Stephen Goldmeier

NOTE: This post first appeared at my Medium page. Go here to read the original version, and go here to see all of my posts on Medium.

Eli Pariser first came across my feeds when he delivered a TED talk decrying technologies that tailor our online world to what we want to see instead of the one we maybe should see. For example, Pariser noted that two different people searching Google for the term “Egypt” see two different results, depending on their location, search history, and more: one sees sunny tourism photos, and the other sees the roiling social and political conflict in the country.

Pariser’s conclusion is that these kind of “filter bubbles” obscure the real world from us and let us live complacent lives. The subtext is that we should be afraid that the machines are controlling what we see, that Big Brother is a robot, and we don’t even know we’re not seeing everything. Wake up, sheeple, etc.

These are potent concerns, and I’m generally inclined to agree with Pariser that we should all be able to make our own decisions about what kind of content we see. But by clicking on tourism photos of Egypt instead of news articles about the political upheaval there, we actually have made a choice. We’ve made thousands of little choices, in fact, that demonstrate what we actually want. It turns out we maybe don’t want to see as many updates on political turmoil in foreign countries as we do pretty photos of tourist attractions. Our filter bubbles accurately reflect our desires.

If that’s the case, if an algorithm has correctly teased out our natural preference, what’s Pariser’s objection? It seems the simplest explanation for Pariser’s concern is that we should all have better preferences, that we prefer the wrong things.

As an aside, there’s another explanation for why people are quick to demand more politically active search results even though they don’t actually click on them. People like to look politically interested even if they are not actually politically interested, and decrying politically blind filter bubbles is an easy way to express this desire. In essence, objecting to the filter bubble is our penance for getting the benefit of the filter bubble. (Žižek would recognize this: he describes buying fair trade coffee from Starbucks as, via the consumerist act itself, buying your redemption from being a consumerist. It’s an idea so beautifully formed that I can’t look directly at it for fear of blinding myself.)

Anyway, the big problem is that there’s an underlying assumption to Pariser’s logic that goes unchallenged, probably because most people share it. Anger at Google for presenting a sunnier, more fun vision of Egypt only makes sense if you think it is capital-I “Important” to see stories about Egypt’s political situation.

If I wanted to see the protests in Egypt, I wouldn’t search for “Egypt.” I’d search for “Egypt protests.” And I would get exactly what I wanted. Pariser assumes that I am less, that I am not being engaged with the world enough, if, when I search for Egypt, I’d prefer to see pyramids and ancient paintings.

Don’t I get to choose what I find Important? Don’t I get to decide which political causes I pay the most attention to? Don’t I have the right to merely skim the news, get informed, and then go about my day looking at pictures of the Sphinx? Who is Eli Pariser to tell me my sense of what is Important is wrong?

Pariser’s world-view is that what is Important is Obvious and possibly even Objective. I do not share that world-view.

Now how do you think Eli Pariser would respond to a company that makes all of its ad revenue and spends all of its time presenting feel-good stories that make the world look like a better place than it might actually be? Presumably, this is just another “filter bubble,” a curator with a sense of what is Important. But it ignores strife, poverty, and all sorts of ugly stuff all over the world, in favor of presenting a reality that looks a lot nicer. Such a company would be obscuring what Eli Pariser might think is Important.

That company is called Upworthy. And Eli Pariser co-founded it.

In a sense, Pariser doesn’t really care what you want to see. He mostly wants you to see the things he wants you to see.

People that take Pariser’s anti-filter-bubble position present themselves as advocates for openness and democracy and making our own decisions. Obviously I’m all for those positions. But if Upworthy is meant to be a solution to the filter bubble problem, its solution is “you should all care more about the things I think are Important.” That’s a position I can’t get behind.

There are larger questions hiding in this discussion. For instance, is it morally objectionable to be entirely uninformed about global politics? Is it possible to be politically aware without being entirely informed? Is it morally sound for “True Detective” to be the thing you care most about, even though there’s major turmoil in Ukraine? These are, I think, interesting questions, but they all relate to the fundamental issue: is there such thing as Objective Importance, things that are Important no matter where you are, what kind of life you live? These are questions that actually do threaten the structural integrity of our filter bubbles. These quetions might actually make our filter bubbles work for us.

I’m really interested in all of these ideas. And I don’t think Upworthy is.

NOTE: This post first appeared at my Medium page. Go here to read the original version, and go here to see all of my posts on Medium.

I think it’s time we stopped pretending Facebook is a place to interact with other people; it’s really only a way to unload data to marketers. And if we actually look at what a Facebook profile contains, this becomes cripplingly obvious.

Here’s an example. Earlier today, I wanted to see what quotes I had listed in my “Favorite Quotations” section on Facebook. But, after a few minutes of looking, I couldn’t find it. This box had disappeared from my profile. I eventually did find the quotes section; it was tucked away at the bottom of my “About” page and hidden under a “See All” fold.

Here’s my guess why Facebook would hide this from me: this is a free-form box, where I can add whatever text I want. It doesn’t have to link to a page, and it can’t even be shared or commented on by my friends. And something like that is a hard thing for Facebook to scrape useful data from.

The most obviously useful set of data Facebook has cataloged is the relationships between people in its network. For instance, it knows who my friends are, and it can guess which of those people are the closest to me and to each other based on how many common friends we all have. I’ve also voluntarily told Facebook who I’ve dated and who I’m related to.

Facebook can’t do that kind of network-analysis on free-form text. If I write, for instance, I really like “Breaking Bad,” and a friend says he really likes “BB (❤ Jessi Pinkmen!!),” Facebook can’t tie these things together and create a concrete data-map identifying us both as fans of the same show. Free-form text, and by extension personality, is not very useful to Facebook.

In fact, if you look at Facebook now, the only way to say you “like” a television show is to find it through a drop-down search box, one that allows you to “like” the show’s official page. In essence, Facebook has morphed the action of listing a favorite television show into something closer to “friending” that show, making your brand loyalties and consumption habits just as trackable and mapable as actual “friend” relationships.

But it doesn’t end there. The default view when you navigate to the television section of your profile is a list of shows you’ve “watched,” not shows you like. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s important. When you share the things you like, you’re curating a favorites list. Your Facebook profile, as a result, describes you. But in this new version of Facebook, you instead showcase everything you watch, and your Facebook profile becomes a catalog of the things you’ve consumed.

Facebook’s also got a watch later feature on the television section. So you can also use Facebook like you’d use Flixster or Goodreads, listing the things you want to consume later. Of course, you can comment on these things, too, and “like” any of these items a friend has added to their list as well, providing more and more social web information rooted in specific products, specificthings you can buy.

Facebook is so giant, and it has so many places to just while away hours adding more and more information. You can add all of the restaurants you’ve been to. You can create a list of bath products you really like, organized by company. You can tell Facebook what TV shows you’ve watched, which ones you liked, and which ones you plan on watching in the future. You can do the same for books, games, and music.

Facebook doesn’t let you do this just because they like learning everything about you. They actually encourage you to do this because every bit of properly formatted data you supply makes it easier to sell things to you (and to basically sell you to advertisers).

Imagine a music promoter representing a new jazz and electro fusion band in Des Moines, Iowa. That promoter could pay Facebook money to show ads for that band only to people that “like” Dizzie Gillespie and Grandmaster Melle Mel in Des Moines. Facebook’s made it really easy for that promoter to buy a list of names of people in its narrowly-tailored target audience. (This could be seen as either a captiatlist Big Brother or a consumer’s paradise… there’s a fine line, as they say.)

In the end, Facebook has always been very good at mapping your social circle. But now it’s also very good at mapping your consumption circle, and that’s a lot more valuable. We’ve packed up our consumption habits into neat little boxes. All Facebook has to do is open the doors and let advertisers peruse the shelves to pick the boxes they want. And we don’t even get paid for making it so easy.

I recently stumbled across an article on Wikipedia about a little bit of Usenet slang from the 90s that has more relevance now than it did maybe even then: the “eternal September.”

The story goes that, every September at universities around America, a bunch of new students would arrive on campus with really no idea what they were doing. Those students would bring their general cluelessness with them when they signed on to Usenet, one of the earliest internet social networks.

As a result of this influx of new people on Usenet’s multiple groups, whatever social norms that had become entrenched there over the course of the prior year seemed to disappear around September of every year. Around that time, new users became the loudest voice, and the whole thing looked less like an organized social network and more like anarchy. Individual Usenet groups became a mess of people who had very little idea how those services worked and how to politely join the conversation. In short, around September of every year, Usenet looked more like a YouTube comment thread than an organized social network. (video possibly NSFW: language)

But around 1993, according to that Wikipedia article, the internet morphed into a thing that new people started using every day. That meant that the anarchic disregard of internet social norms was happening constantly. New people were continually joining these services, and there was always a rabble that just didn’t know how to behave in those groups. (Ignoring, for a moment, those that purposely disregard these rules for the lulz.)

That’s what led a guy named Dave Fischer to write that September 1993 had never ended, that Usenet would forever feel like it was another anarchic September. The rabble of new users had overtaken Usenet’s ability to instill social norms, and internet etiquette was a thing of the past.

This is so fascinating to me. The most obvious plain meaning of the phrase is that internet etiquette is basically no longer a thing. The ever-broadening scope of the internet means that only very small subgroups, i.e. individual subreddits, forums, etc., have any ability to actually instill etiquette in their participants, and even these small subgroups face a constant September of clueless and etiquette-less new users. And the eternal September effect means that something like YouTube, with such a giant user base, can’t ever really develop specific sets of norms or etiquette because the September turnover is constant. There’s no persistent user base that can enact the social norms with any efficacy. The September has gotten so long that new users are the norm, not mannered pre-September users. Hence, YouTube comment threads.

But beyond that, this “eternal September” effect could also be understood as the philosophy that creates a certain kind of elitism-based humor on the internet. For instance, there’s at least one blog dedicated to showcasing individuals that think articles from The Onion are real news stories. That blog essentially highlights the fact that there are constantly new people finding The Onion that have never seen it before. It’s all about The Onion’s “eternal September.”

That’s true of Twitter (see, e.g., the old man who thinks Twitter is a search engine), Facebook (see, e.g., this woman who mistook Facebook’s status update box for a search box (possibly NSFW: very embarrassing search)), and even iPhone’s autocorrect feature (see generally people that are too new to autocorrect to know that they have to check their work). Presumably, the people who are doing these things would stop doing them after acclimating to Twitter, Facebook, and the iPhone. But this “eternal September” means that content will never run out for these types of blogs, because new people are constantly just starting to use these social tools and, therefore, just starting to use them wrong.

And the “eternal September” shows no sign of going away. If anything, it’s eternal-ness is only now becoming apparent. Because the “eternal September” applies not only to new users of established technologies, but also to new technologies. Or maybe more accurately, the increasingly frequent arrivals of new technologies (and updates to old technologies) mean that there are limitless opportunities for new September users. You can see these Septembers happen every time Facebook changes its layout or a new social networking platform arises.

“Eternal September” is a description of the lag between the first adoption of a technology and its widespread use, a description that applies to pretty much every technological development (no matter how small) and pretty much every person at some point. The phrase is coded with scorn for those that are slightly behind, the same scorn accompanying the term “n00b”. And it’s a particularly cruel scorn, because it isn’t early adopters making fun of late adopters, it’s early adopters confronting slightly-less-early adopters. This kind of early adopter can be notoriously elitist, and this is a tool for the barely-earlier adopters to hold their perceived superiority over an ever-larger group of people.

And that’s why September of ’93 is longer than even those original elitist Usenet denizens could have guessed: it’s a tool for enacting that ever-present elitism. At its core, the “eternal September” is a mechanism for those from last September to make fun of those from THIS September, all the while blissfully ignoring the fact that, maybe days ago, maybe hours ago, they were also just arriving.

(Photo by Bertrand Petitjean, used under a CC license)

And the solution isn’t angry prosecution or sting operations. The solution is trying to understand these interactions better. Technology isn’t likely to entirely outmode the social contract any time soon. We still have to make our society work. And only more education and more understanding will make that happen.

(More about LulzSec at the SBO News Tumblr!)

I know this isn’t usually the place for news. So, I’ve decided to start a blog that IS a good place for news. Surprise! It’s the Stars Blink Out Tumblr. Check it out! And if you tumbl, maybe reblog some stuff!

Osama Bin Laden was killed last week.

Yeah, I know, not exactly breaking news. But I know you don’t really come to this blog for “news.” Instead, as you might expect, I have something to say related to how people responded to this news, specifically on the Internet and on online social networks (surprise!).

Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” provided a pretty interesting discussion about how online social networking has effected the reactions to Osama bin Laden’s death. I’d like to expand on it slightly.

The always-enlightening Gabfest crowd discussed generally our new-found societal inclination to publicly declare our personally felt sentiments. The argument is that we now live in a society so fixated on authenticity that everyone now feels compelled to share their feelings on this momentous event publicly and immediately, no filtering.

The Gabfest’s major misstep is evident in the final moments of the segment: they essentially finish the story with each of them saying that they didn’t do this themselves, but everyone else did, so it’s a reflection of a cultural force. If it IS a cultural force, why are they immune to it?

I think understanding our obsession with authenticity as some sort of uncontrollable urge to share our feelings is to misstate what social networking actually does accomplish here.

It’s certainly true that online social networks make it easier to reflect authentically our own feelings to our friends. But the online social network can do only that: facilitate the offline social network. In other words, the only people who take to Facebook or Twitter to publicly share their emotional reactions to bin Laden’s death are the same people that were disseminating these sentiments through their own offline social networks before these websites even existed.

The result is that, while it might look like people are having an unprecedented emotional response to some global piece of news (be it joy at the death of an enemy or shame at the public celebration of a person’s death), that emotional response is essentially the same as it has always been, just more visible.

The real novelty in this situation is not that more people are sharing their opinions; it’s that more people are seeing each other’s opinions. Back on September 11th, 2001, for instance, I could only get the reactions of those people that I saw around me on a daily basis. And believe me, they were vitriolic and extreme and numerous. But they were limited in number by the amount of people in my social network that I saw on any given day.

All online social networks have done is expanded the functional, accessible size of this social network, making these opinions LOOK more common, even though they are as common as they always have been.

But online social networks have also, to a certain extent, democratized the response to situations like this. Offline, the people with whom I correspond most regularly and sunstainedly are those that tend to agree with me. That is the nature of friendship. But online social networks make friendship something a little more broad. A more diverse group of people now have access to my attention, people that I do care about but I wouldn’t have heard from in a previous era of information sharing. Essentially, instead of getting the somewhat limited viewpoints of those friends that I already most closely agree with, I get the diverse perspectives of the broadest circle of my friends.

Authenticity is at war with artifice every day. We want to authentically represent ourselves, but we also wear slimming clothes and make-up and only say the things we think won’t disrupt or offend those around us. Maybe some of us maintain less distance between impulse and action, but in the end, we shape our actions to what we want those actions to be, not some deep sense of who we are. (Sure, what we want our actions to be is influenced by that deep “who we are,” but even if the animus is deep, the agency is at a higher level.)

That war between impulse and control, between authenticity and self-definition still exists online. Online social networks have not achieved some unprecedented level of authenticity in social interaction; they’ve achieved an unprecedented AMOUNT of social interaction. The nature of that interaction is essentially unchanged, still as authentic or inauthentic as it always has been.

In my opinion, that’s probably more useful. How much do we desire a society where people say whatever is on their mind all of the time? How much to we desire pure, unadulterated authenticity? I’d argue that the authenticity that we now have access to is the more useful variety: people can easily, quickly and accurately represent how they see themselves, not necessarily what they objectively are. That, to me, is the bedrock upon which social interaction is built. I’m glad it’s the kind of authenticity brought out by such an ambivalence-breeding event like this one.

(Image from this informative post on BlazoMania)

I love a story that combines really fundamental issues about how people apprehend meaning with the complexities of anticipating how our own technology will impact our cultural future. And no story combines these elements so elegantly and so surprisingly interestingly as the story of the Department of Energy’s 1991 waste isolation report, as reported by Slate.

First, a brief summary of the problem the plan anticipates, as reported by the article: our nuclear waste and nuclear materials are going to last longer than us. That’s just a fact of the chemistry of these materials. These hazardous materials will remain hazardous long after the possible collapse of all of society, or even the death of all man-kind.

So, in an effort to protect future human societies (and possible non-human ones) from the waste, we’d have to find a way of labeling this material as hazardous for a people whose language might look nothing at all like ours and whose society is entirely unpredictably organized.

The solution hatched by Sandia Labs, in a report commissioned by the Department of Energy, is a surprising but sensible one: hire a bunch of people that are experts at conveying information symbolically to come up with some immediately-recognizable sign or some information transfer mechanism to alert future societies of the hidden dangers we have created.

For those unfamiliar with it, semiotics is a branch of philosophy that deals with symbols. It’s a study that seeks to explain how symbols indicate other things, how that indication is created, how the brain dives through layers of symbols almost automatically, and all of the different ways these symbols are manifested.

So expert semioticians are essentially people who are experts at how things MEAN other things. It makes sense, then, that these are the people hired to devise something lasting and language-independent that indicates danger to any observer.

The solutions they propose are just mind-bendingly clever. One proposal: build a lattice of sharp, dangerous looking rocks on top of the waste, discouraging exploration of the area. Another plan calls for building giant stone structures with pathways through them that are too narrow for people to set up camps and live there, thus discouraging settling in the polluted area.

Some rely on more complex systems not directly linked to the symbols themselves, but to how symbols gain meaning. One such proposal is the setting-up of a priestly class of sorts that would know of the dangers of the nuclear sites and would transmit this information in a form more akin to religious dogma than to scientific learning.

The whole discussion smacks of junk futurism and conspiracy theories, like Project Bluebook or a set of secret orders for the president on how to deal with an alien invasion. The difference is that the problem anticipated here is essentially a certainty, something guaranteed by the physical laws of the universe.

This is a forward-thinking approach to something that is essentially a predictable result of our current actions. We’ve created dangerous waste that, as long as it is on this earth, is dangerous to humanity for generations upon generations to come. The waste already exists. It is something that we KNOW will exist for a predictable time into the future. We’re just attempting to mitigate against its ill effects.

I don’t know how well the idea of an atomic priesthood is going to work. But I really do love the idea of landscapes constructed to be difficult to live in just to warn people off from nuclear waste sites. What if the darkest, most uninhabitable depths of the ocean are actually created by a long-dead advanced civilization to hide the technologies that became their very undoing?

I know it sounds like an INSANE stretch, but this plan seems to suggest that this scenario might be the reality of distant-future generations.

(Image from the original report, depicting a “menacing earthworks” approach to deterring people from disturbing a nuclear waste site.)

Those of you that know me (and those that don’t but have been reading my posts for a while here) certainly have seen that I’m not a fan of modern copyright law. I think it’s too complex to work, too restrictive on first amendment rights, and generally gets used in a way that is anti-art, not pro-art. But that’s only the first version of myself. You probably also know that I’m not a copyright abolitionist or copyright-basher. Version two of myself thinks that copyright is necessary, and it can be used reasonably and in a huge variety of ways to actually make the world of culture a lot better.

Now if I were solely that first version of myself, I’d look at a story of an artist doing something weird with copyright law and I’d say “AHA! Copyright is broken! This is endemic of the deeply flawed system!” But for this critique of a recent story involving Lady Gaga, I’m going to be entirely that second version of myself. The tech and law blog Techdirt recently posted a story that’s all about how Lady Gaga’s recent actions betray just how horribly flawed copyright law is, which is a story that the first version of myself would praise the hell out of, but the second version of myself is just too riled up by the whole thing to let that happen.

The article suggests that, if we look at how Lady Gaga uses copyright law, we can see just how broken copyright law is. The article asserts that Lady Gaga uses copyright in a way that does not at all match with the actual reason for copyright law’s existence. Copyright law is meant to incentivize creation of new art, and the article says that Lady Gaga’s attempts to use these laws for herself show just how far from this original goal the actual uses of copyright law have strayed.

Specifically, the article cites two major examples: Gaga’s recent suit against “Baby Gaga” for the use of her image and her brand, and her treatment of photographers at her concerts, specifically that she requires them to sign agreements that give her copyright in their images. Let’s take these one at a time, then talk about why the whole endeavor of criticizing Gaga’s use of copyright law is actually really deeply flawed, even more flawed than the actual modern copyright system.

So the article only mentions in passing that the Baby Gaga thing is probably not copyright. But that’s really important, so let’s not conflate. Gaga sued on the use of her name and on the use of her personality rights, things like her sensibilities and her style. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that Lady Gaga doesn’t have the right to control her image and her brand, which are the EXACT TYPES of things that trademark and personality rights are meant to protect. In other words, the Baby Gaga suit is not an example of Lady Gaga’s twisted understanding of copyright law, it’s a sign of her ACCURATE understanding of trademark and personality rights law, two fields of law that are actually surprisingly sensible compared to copyright law.

The slightly more sticky example is the photographer contracts. I don’t like what Gaga is doing with these, but she’s certainly within her rights to do it. Those contracts include terms about how they can use the photos, something that’s pretty NORMAL for photographer agreements. These photographers sign agreements when they go to her concerts, so it’s not like she’s affecting their first amendment rights or something: they are essentially her employees when they contract with her.

The bottom line is that if she wants to put limits on the scope of these photographers’ agreements with her, they still have to AGREE to those limits if they want the access she’s agreeing to give them. They give something of value up and receive something of value in exchange. If they want to retain copyright of their images, they should photograph a different event, let someone who doesn’t care about who owns their art become Lady Gaga’s shill for that gig. This is a contracts and competition issue, not a copyright one.

The point of the Techdirt article is essentially that copyright has morphed into something terrible because people like Lady Gaga use it in unanticipated ways. But most of the unanticipated ways they list here aren’t even copyright related: they’re contracts and trademark related.

But let’s not forget the real reason that copyright law is structured as it is, with lots of very small things declared the rights of the artist. It’s designed to control the use of an artist’s work, no matter what that art is and no matter what the use is. It’s supposed to be flexible in the direction of rights-holders, ideally artists. And this flexibility is in place to allow for emerging markets.

Here’s what I’m saying: if the purpose of copyright law is to incentivize art by creating ways in which artists can control the use of that art and therefore profit from it, then isn’t allowing an artist who’s show is a spectacle worth seeing the ability to contract with photographers carefully just another way of incentivizing creating these kinds of shows? Isn’t Lady Gaga just taking advantage of one of those incentives with this kind of deal, not going against the incentive-based intentions of copyright law?

That’s not to say that she’s making a GOOD move or that she’s doing something that is good for the legal landscape of art (she probably isn’t). But she IS doing exactly what copyright law would have her do: she’s monetizing her art using controls on distribution. It’s what the founders would have wanted.

(Image: Lady Gaga Screen Print Painting, a CC-licensed photograph of a copyrightable screen print painting, probably a non-licensed derivative work of a surely-copyrighted, duly licensed image of Lady Gaga. IT’S COMPLICATED.)

It’s that time of year again. That time when we remember romantic love, and how glorious it can be. Where we send cards to our loved ones explaining how unqualifiedly wonderful they are. There are no “If you would stop snoring you’d be perfect” cards or “I wish you were more self-confident” cards, only “I Love You” and “Be Mine.”

Yes, it’s Valentines Day, the heart-shaped box of treacle that so oversimplifies the complexity of relationships. And that can be kind of nice, enjoying the simple things, remembering the good, and celebrating people we care about. But when we start to unpack that heart-shaped box, we start to see the cracks in the veneer on this love-fest and the complicated troubles of this yearly remembrance.

The trouble starts when you consider the origins of this holiday. Because “holiday” is a laden word, and it’s not clear if it applies to Valentine’s Day.

The event first started as a classic Catholic saint’s day, a day reserved for remembrances of the holiest Christians and how they (usually) gruesomely gave their lives in martyrdom to the cause. In St. Valentine’s case, no one really knows what happened to him, but it’s pretty clear it probably had nothing to do with love (interestingly, because of the uncertainty around the story of St. Valentine, his official Catholic saint’s day was removed from the calendar in the 60s).

Somehow, this religious observance morphed into a celebration of romantic love. It started as far back as the 1700s, and British hand-made valentines were popular throughout the 1800s, but the whole practice turned a corner into mass-production and commercialization at some point.

The blame is usually cast on the greeting card companies. The term “hallmark holiday” was invented for Valentine’s Day. These companies had finally created a wholly novel celebration of romantic love, which led to years and years of cards, commercials, movies, and television, filled with plastic portrayals of what is ostensible a very dynamic and heated emotion.

The whole Valentine thing smacks of historical disconnect, exaggerated sentiment, and irrelevance. But when we look at the cultural reaction to that disconnect, instead of seeing a wall of uniform disdain, we see something pretty varied and complex.

On the one hand, a lot of people still really like this holiday. Aside from couples that always make a big deal out of the holiday, there’s still that universal grade school experience of making valentines for your classmates (in my school, we had to make one for each student in the class, but anecdotes from others would have me believe that some schools allowed a little bit of selection, and therefore pre-teen heartbreak). Maybe that experience catches some of us and carries over to adulthood, because there’s still a pretty solid market for Valentine’s Day candy and cards.

There’s also the yearly Valentine’s episode, a staple of most television shows. By no means are these specials all good, but they are ubiquitous, expected by audiences, and even looked forward to by some critics. For better or for worse, our culture is one in which the mainstream has embraced February 14th as a day to celebrate candy, hearts, pink and red, paper cards with superheroes or puns on them, and, not least, love.

But let’s not forget that there’s a tremendous amount of backlash against this holiday. Of all of the holidays on the calendar, it’s the one people most love to hate. Mother’s Day, an equally invented holiday, is pretty universally seen as a good opportunity to thank our mothers, not as the crass commercialization of a complex relationship (even though it basically is just that, to the same extent as Valentine’s Day).

Maybe that’s the cultural power of this holiday. Valentine’s Day is, if nothing else, a versatile holiday. Getting together with your single friends to get drunk doesn’t sound like a romantic evening, but it IS a celebration of the holiday. People celebrate by burning their ex’s stuff, or by drinking wine with friends, or by watching action movies to rebel against the whole thing. Even those that love to hate Valentine’s Day still are getting some serious utility out of its existence.

But the list of hypothetical V-Day activities does seem to focus a lot on the ample dark side of the holiday. I think NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour said it best when they said that Valentine’s Day tends to have at least some negative emotional and social effects, no matter what your situation is. The unhappily single person is reminded of their single-ness, the new couple is reminded of the complexity and pressure associated with serious relationships, and even stable, long-term couples still sometimes run into mismatched expectations over the holiday.

On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish. Valentine’s Day offers no such out: single people remain single, unhappily married couples continue to be unhappily married, and gay couples remain marginalized and unable to marry.

Romantic relationships are complex, but Valentine’s Day is, at its heart, a holiday celebrating simplicity. To that end, those that revel in the simplicity of the whole thing (television shows, the rare adoring couple that gets SUPER into it, greeting card writers, jaded V-Day rebels, etc.) can revel in this holiday. But any reminders of the underlying intricacy and incomprehensibility of romance make this holiday empty and galling.

So from all of us at Stars Blink Out, where we are dedicated to highlighting the complexity in even the most simple situations, have a strange, confusing, complicated, crass, and maybe a little sweet, Valentines Day.

(image adapted from Pink Love Heart Box)

It’s Episode 9! The internet is swimming in bullshit and feel-goodery, and we’re here to talk about that. First, Upworthy’s clickbait headlines have saturated Facebook, whether the underlying stories are true or not. Then, there are a bunch of people creating their own mini reality shows using Twitter, also becoming popular whether they’re true or not. Finally, an update on Wikipedia vandalism, a ridiculous (local!) car chase, and the first ever selfie. Join us, won’t you?

As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.) And also, subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• Upworthy.com
• Beautiful cricket music! (and the Snopes article about it)
• A dad’s letter to his gay son, and the shades of truth within
• The story I wrongly kept mentioning during that segment
• The viral receipt hoax
• That really great article from The New Inquiry
• Mike Daisey and his Apple story
• On whether that one Gawker commenter’s story can be trusted
• Radiolab on imagining problems complexly
• Rooftop Breakup
• Elan Gale’s “epic note passing” (yuck)
• …was a lie!
• OUR OWN PODCAST on Internet Folk Heroes
• Ex-NSA head gets live-tweeted
• Liv Sandven
• The dumbest police chase this internet person has ever seen
• The first selfie in history
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW:

Welcome back! It’s episode 8! The hiatus is over, and we’ve finally figured out how to do these shows from two different cities. Apologies for the audio problems in the middle. We discuss Wikipedia’s growing lobbying problem, the strange story of Horse_ebooks and PronunciationBook, and finally our links of the week and updates. As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)

Subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• Wikipedia has a sock puppet problem
• Wikipedia editor numbers are down
• PronunciationBook
• Horse_ebooks
• A rundown of the whole thing
• The Daily Dot staffer tied up in the Bear Stearns Bravo mess in her own words
• Her podcast appearance on “TLDR”
• Guy Fieri beats up his hairdresser
• Link rot at the Supreme Court
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW:

It’s the first episode of “Hashtag Hashbrowns,” brunch with Stephen and Katherine. We muse about what it means to live in Ohio, wonder at Miley Cyrus’s skill with a breakup song, find ourselves moderately vexed by the use of hashtags in daily conversation, talk in slightly too much detail about sardines, and pay our due to a great scientific mind. Listen below! (OR CLICK HERE for more information about what this is.)

subscribe to the feed / check us out on iTunes / see all of the blog posts

Coming soon to Enchantment Under The Sea: a new podcast called “Hashtag Hashbrowns,” brunch with Stephen and Katherine (i.e. Stephen Goldmeier, an editor here, and his sister-in-law, Katherine Schmidt). We’ll be exploring cultural ideas while having a casual weekend brunch. Stay tuned.

Welcome to episode 7! Sorry for the delay; this one took a long time in editing. This episode features a short discussion about the Rolling Stone magazine cover photo of the Boston bombing suspect, a longer discussion about the phenomenon that was Lonelygirl15, and links of the week and updates. As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)

Subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• The Rolling Stone cover
• Another photographic perspective
• Wikipedia article on LG15
• Her first vlog
• iChannel
• Lizzie Bennet Diaries
• Tweet of the Living Dead
• A British news story claims Charles Ramsey is broke, but the man himself denies the truth of the story.
• Propaganda
• Geraldo selfie
• Cosplay video
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW:

Welcome to episode 6! In section one, it’s all about the internet’s response to the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman trial, ranging from the very serious (racism) to the somewhat light-hearted (Skype hijinks). Next, companies are waging wars daily to become the go-to place for internet services. We’ve got two stories about such wars. And finally, our internet things of the “week,” including a lengthy rant about Kid Nation from myself. As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)

(EDIT (7/13/2013, 10:18pm): The court in the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman case just announced that the jury has found Mr. Zimmerman not guilty of an sort of homicide offense. This does not change anything we said in the episode, but it was obviously recorded before this announcement.)

Subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• George Zimmerman’s lawyer’s joke
• A story about Rachel Jeantel’s testimony, with sample video
• Expert Witness Skype Bombing
• Instagram vs. Vine, featuring a great chart
• Feedly, our choice for Google Reader replacement
• Imgur’s new meme generator, to replace Quickmeme
• Tobias’s pick: PTSD clarinet boy
• Stephen’s pick: Sudden Clarity Clarence
• Quickmeme’s downfall
• Travis Irvine’s open letter
• Michael from Kid Nation AMA
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW:

If the new film Man of Steel is any indicator, then it’s true: DC doesn’t really get Superman anymore. At one point, they did. When Superman first appeared in 1938, he was a quintessential crime-fighter. He replaced the beat cops and detectives of classic crime comics with something new and exciting, an outsized and morally superior force for truth and justice. On the brink of an impossibly ugly world war, Superman was simple, beautiful. DC had it on lock back then. But now DC has no idea what to do with this guy.

Marvel is actually probably to blame for DC’s current predicament. DC was riding high for a very long time. But after a lull in the popularity of superhero comics, Marvel unleashed its own set of heroes. To a certain extent, Marvel’s innovation was to create superheroes who were also human, not morally superior crime-fighters, but people with families and challenges. Iron Man had his drinking, Spider-Man had his girl troubles and family drama, and the Hulk had some… anger issues. Marvel in essence put the emphasis on the man, not on the super.

DC saw the tide turning, and to remain part of the superhero market, they had to respond. Batman survived the transition easily, thanks to a crop of new writers that developed a more Marvel-flavored mythology for the Dark Knight, chief among them Frank Miller. His Dark Knight Returns series redefined Batman as driven by revenge and obsessed with turning the tide of crime in Gotham, an angst ridden human being with a reason to fight. Considering the wide-eyed biff-bam-pow image of Batman from before this era, it’s a crazy reinvention, one that was so wildly successful that it spawned Christopher Nolan’s eventual character-defining trilogy.

Superman, on the other hand, didn’t survive this transition as easily. In this humanized era of superherodom, Batman was tested by the death of someone he loved and psychologically tortured by an actual mad-man; Superman faced such alien challenges as being killed and reborn in an alien regeneration chamber, trying to solve world hunger, or being split into two versions of himself. Not very accessible.

There are other indicators of Superman’s failure to adjust. His aloof moral superiority actually aligns him with the villains in the aforementioned Dark Knight Returns series. And that’s not the only time Superman’s quaint old-timeyness was a major plot-point. The interesting Superman stories all take as granted his moral superiority and invincibility but subvert either the setting or consequences. In The Dark Knight Returns, Superman has been remade into an American poster boy, a living breathing nuclear deterrent. He’s also been re-imagined in a vastly different social structure as a communist hero. He’s even become a dictator.

Superman is an iconic and important figure in the American cultural landscape. But he earned that status by being the best version of humanity in an era facing the worst of humanity. The idea of heroism and morality, in the most broad sense, has been complicated significantly since the 40s and 50s, when superman came of age. In today’s world, where heroes need to be complex and troubled to match our conception of heroism, uncomplicated moral authority and invincibility just aren’t interesting. But, Superman is incompatible with moral gray areas and human struggles. It’s a hard thing to work around.

So. Zack Snyder and David Goyer made this movie. And if you’ve heard anything about the movie, I’m sure you can already tell: I had problems with it. (some mild spoilers ahead)

This new superman film is called Man of Steel, which, tellingly, doesn’t even have the word Superman in the title, despite ostensibly being an origin story. And when reduced to its barest bones, it does sort of look like a Superman origin story: the planet Krypton is nearing its final end, and one desperate statesman sends to Earth his only begotten son, that whosoever he rescueth shall not perish etc. etc. etc. The people reject him, but he fights for humanity despite its flaws, and he eventually towers above them as their savior. Hallelujah.

You can choose your biblical parallel: in both this film and in the last one 7 years ago, at some point during the heroics, Superman prominently foists his arms outward and adopts the stance of Jesus on the cross. You could also go slightly more semitic: Superman isn’t the only baby boy ever placed in a basket to escape genocide. Superman was created by two Jewish gents in the 30s and 40s, a time rife with antisemitism. In fact, some of Superman’s earliest stories involve him fighting Nazis. Jesus or Moses: either way, uprightness and self-sacrifice are in Superman’s DNA.

Yeah, this movie maybe didn’t do its research on how Superman is supposed to work. Instead of the son of a farmer with a moral imperative, we’ve got an itinerant hobo determined to let others die through inaction and a penchant for coldly snapping his enemies’ necks. What went wrong?

Well, let’s start with the emotional core of this movie: presumably, Clark Kent’s relationship to his dad and how that influences his decisions as Superman. That is, in fact, the emotional core of most Superman origin stories.

In an early scene, Clark saves his classmates from a bus crash, and we seem to be getting off on the right foot. But, strangely, Clark’s dad reprimands him for his heroics, telling him that sometimes you just have to let people die to protect your own secret. It’s bonkers, but Clark internalizes it, and later, when Pa Kent must sacrifice himself to save the family dog from a surprise tornado, Clark follows dad’s advice, stands by, and forces himself to watch in anguish as his father dies in order to protect his own secret identity.

There are so many problems with this that I can’t even list all of them. But for our purposes, this fundamentally misunderstands what Superman is supposed to be about. Superman is the one who has the power to stand up to injustice because he cannot be threatened by evildoers. He is an unquestionable arbiter of right and wrong, always making the choice that helps the greater good. He isn’t supposed to let people die to protect himself, let alone on the orders of his ostensible humanizing influence, his father. It’s disgusting.

And it only gets worse. As Superman is fighting against General Zod and his forces, he lays waste to two towns: first Smallville and then Metropolis, the only homes he has ever known. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people die during Superman’s epic battle against the fugitive Kryptonians, and Superman doesn’t go out of his way to save a single human life throughout this protracted struggle. He just fights aliens while buildings topple, people get crushed, and things explode. It’s wanton, blind destruction; the supermen fight, and the weak are crushed underfoot.

I would love to be able to state concisely what this movie’s vision of Superman actually is, but, in fact, the movie doesn’t bother to hash that out. At one point, Superman says he’ll protect Americans, but only on his own terms, though it’s not clear what that even means: he’ll only fight the aliens if he isn’t held accountable for the countless civilians he indirectly kills in the process? What exactly does Superman think his job is?

So fine, this movie doesn’t really understand how to address Superman as a mythological idea. But the whole disaster leaves me wondering what happened. It shouldn’t have been like this. The people responsible for this film are all pretty heavy hitters with at least partially proven track records. Zack Snyder directed this movie, and he also helmed the totally passable Watchmen adaptation and the actually pretty great Dawn of the Dead remake (ignoring momentarily his other utter failures). David Goyer wrote the screenplay, and he was an integral part of the really great previously-mentioned Dark Knight film trilogy. And Christopher Nolan helped with story and produced; he’s an established visionary in both comic book films and big-budget action movies in general. In the end, it seems clear that none of these men (and they are ALL men, gender problems being another aspect of this production that stinks pretty strongly) has any idea what to do with Superman.

Superman is hard. I get that. He’s a paragon, a perfect man, and it’s hard to make a perfect man interesting. But others have tried and succeeded; this movie doesn’t seem like it’s even trying. It’s the laziest, flashiest, most boring, and most incomprehensible superhero film in years. And, from what I can tell, there are already very serious talks about sequels and spin-offs. Maybe this movie did get one thing right: humanity really does need a savior. Just not this one.

So I won’t bury the lead. This is the End is the kind of thing you do when you’ve grown so successful, you stop worrying about what you shouldn’t do. In the case of this movie, permanent collaborators Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan think they can make an action movie. But they can’t.

The result is on balance reasonably funny, but not surprisingly, also a self-indulgent and shapeless movie that’s basically an extended inside joke for a bunch of celebrities. I guess it’s not really a comedian’s job to self-censor, but someone eventually steps in and yins out the yang when producing a major motion picture with a $30 million budget. Not here. Goldberg and Rogan get a blank check, and there’s not a sight gag (via a revolving door of cameos) they avoid, nor is there a dick joke they won’t make.

Quite a few comedies are built on the premise of allowing comedians to basically portray thinly-veiled versions of themselves. This is The End cuts to the chase and allows its cast to just play themselves, albeit heavily fictionalized. Rogan (playing himself) and Jay Baruchel (also playing himself) get together in Los Angeles to smoke weed and play video games. Then they head to a party at James Franco’s house that’s jam packed full of actors, comedians, and Rihanna for some reason (all playing themselves). And then a dissonantly manic Michael Cera blows a fistful of coke into Christopher Mintz Plasse’s face. It’s not long after that when Baruchel stumbles upon Cero getting a double ended beej in the bathroom. Craig Robinson spends the entire party — and then the entire movie — wearing a shirt that says “TAKE YO PANTIES OFF” with a monogrammed towel hanging over his left shoulder. I’ll take it.

Pretty soon things go bad though, and much of the entire cast of Freaks and Geeks besides James Franco dies. Michael Cera in particular gets some screen time here. Other remaining survivors are  Seth Rogan, Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Robinson, and Danny McBride. They set about consuming all the drugs in the house and set about the important business of filming Pineapple Express 2 on a handicam. I’m still on board here.

But soon they run out of things to do. And so does the movie.

This is the End is at its strongest when it just lets the cast play up the caricatures of themselves as grown-up, rich and drug-addled nerds with fragile egos and a lack of practical skills facing an impossible situation. But it loses its way when it tries to think of things for the actors to do. That’s how we end up with Jonah Hill getting raped by the devil during the night, and then getting possessed and barfing all over Rogen and Franco while everyone else is off looking for supplies. It’s a parody of The Exorcist with dick jokes.

I’ve read another review that compares the movie’s take on a the apocalyptic genre to Shaun of the Dead. But Goldberg and Rogan don’t hold a candle to Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s ability to actually ape an effective action movie within the framework of a deadpan comedy. This is the End plods toward a deceptive 107-minute run time, and while it’s fairly amusing, it fails to pass basic muster as a genre film. It’s not a total loss, and I get this is supposed to be an anti-story of sorts. But Wright and Peggy’s Cornetto Trilogy has shown us– and likely will show us later this year – that we can, and should, expect more.

This episode, number 5, is all about the recent revelations about the NSA and its data-gathering operations. First, we talk about what actually was revealed and what it might mean. Then, we talk about the whistleblower himself and how he’s being received by the internet at large, either as a hero or as a traitor. Finally, some updates, show notes, and featured links. This episode’s subject is rapidly evolving, so new information is coming out all of the time. As a result, our coverage of the story might be lacking. We’ve still got some serious thoughts. We’ll be back for more fun next episode. As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)

Subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• Threat Level’s coverage of the NSA leaks
• Glenn Greenwald’s original story
• David Brooks’s op-ed on Snowden
• David Letterman’s drum fascination
• The Game’s big bill
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW:

Welcome to episode 4, the “technical difficulty” episode. First: we discuss Gawker’s involvement with Tornoto’s crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford. Then, Peter Molyneux’s iPhone game experiment “Curiosity” and the surprising sequel. Finally, in a segment that took three recording tries to finally get right, feedback and links of the week. As always, please email us with feedback or leave it below! (CAUTION: there are some swears in this.)

Subscribe to our podcast using THIS FEED or SUBSCRIBE THROUGH ITUNES!

Relevant links (some are possibly NSFW):

• Gawker ‘s “crack-starter”
• Manti Te’o on Deadpsin
• The Toledo track coach on Deadspin

• Godus Players Can ‘Overthrow’ Their Virtual God Bryan

• Cow Clicker

• God games
• Murder of Kitty Genovese
• Local People With Their Arms Crossed
• Manos in HD
• Our Theme Music: “The Adventure Lights,” by Skip Cloud
• Also featuring “Friend of Mine” by the French Girls and “Did I Miss Something Right Now?” by Roads.

LISTEN BELOW: