Dear Mr. Cuccinelli,
Let me say, I applaud your desire to curtail the horrid child prostitution industry. I think your intentions are at least modestly noble. However, I am dismayed by you current tactics, which seems to overlook thousands of years of military understanding and the full history of the internet.
You see, your recent letter demanding to have online classifieds site CraigsList remove their Adult Services section will do far more harm than good in the attempt to realize the above stated desires.
Let’s take a look at the situation, shall we?
- Currently, the Adult Services section of CraigsList serves as a single location where a number of prostitution-related crimes are negotiated.
- The operators of CraigsList are known, and even if they are not as cooperative as would be liked, they can be reached and reasoned with. There is an open means of communication.
- The Police are able to understand and operate within the confines of the CraigsList environment both to monitor activities and set up sting operations.
The current situation, while not ideal, is a rather understandable one. It’s familiar. We know who and where the players are. We are able to plan accordingly. Kind of looks like the Cold War, which is good because we actually won that.
What does removing the Adult Services section do to the above picture?
Gone. Welcome to the world of asymmetric and mobile enemies. Removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section will instantly create a vacuum which, in the short term, might lower the rates of prostitution-related crimes. However, as we’ve seen time and time again on the internet, the removal of a centralized service leads to rapidly innovating and dispersed target. Take a look at the state of copyright infringement post-Napster. The RIAA’s single, predictable location for music filesharing has morphed into an entity that cannot be pinned down and adapts to stay one technological step ahead of those who would stop it.
Gone. If you think the operators of CraigsList have been less-than-wholly helpful, wait until you’ve trying to hunt down the owners of anonymous prostitution websites. In fact, why don’t you talk to the FBI crimes against children task forces. I bet they can regale you with tales of just how hard it is to track down some of these more-savvy pedophiles.
Right now, you can pick up the phone and call Craig.
Gone…mostly. The tactics and training will have to be modified, turning police into into hunters capable of scouring the internet at large, finding, understanding, adapting, and documenting tactics on the fly. Even if the initial crop of sites and services that pop up operate exactly like CraigsList, the number of replacements will require more police to patrol them.
Removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section takes the familiar, symmetric war and replaces it with an asymmetric, agile, iterative battle. The known is replaced with the unknown. Resources are stretched thinner. Those engaging in prostitution-related crimes get better at their tasks. Innovation occurs in the exact place where you don’t want it. In the end, removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section won’t decrease prostitution-related crimes. If history has taught us anything, killing the Adult Services section will increase prostitution.
But you can’t put that on a campaign ad, can you?
From an OpEd in a Philly “non-biased” newspaper that caters towards “families.”
A woman can’t imagine a man reloading his double barrel shotgun or chopping wood when he’s donned in Donna Karan and drinking an Appletini.
Well, it’s hard to reload a double barrel shotgun while drinking anything – it’s a two handed activity. Actually, it takes both hands and likely the use of your hip. See, you gotta open the breach and then you’re going to want to trap the butt between your hip and elbow while hanging the barrel over your forearm…oh, the author of the above quote was just trying to make a vague point? Huh. Maybe she should have thought her argument out a bit more.
If you’d like to find out more about what makes a real man, click here.
From this weekend’s New York Times Magazine:
Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.
Lets see:
_ completing school
√ leaving home
√ becoming financially independent
_ marrying
_ having a child
I’m 40% grown up! And I’m completely okay with that. Now, if you’ll need me, I’ll be screwing around on the internet until I can reach the weekend and play some video games.
This is probably the scariest thing you’ll read today. This is a peek inside of my mind during yesterday’s hangover. This has not been edited to protect the innocent.
Artist's Representation
I’m hungry. I should make waffles.
All I have are eggos. How unhealthy are eggos? More importantly, how unhealthy can I make eggos?
By being frozen, eggos have evaded the breakfast box read for decades now.
I bet they’re toxic. I wonder if we could say that eggos are toxic like Britney Spears.
Wait. Where the hell has she been? We haven’t made fun of Britney in months now.
In fact, we haven’t made fun of the guy who cried at us for making fun of Britney in months now.
Stupid Lindsey Lohan.
And there you have it, folks. That’s how Lindsey Lohan ruined my breakfast.
For a writer, I tend to do quite a few image searches. Not nearly as many now as I used to do when I was actively editing Fiction Matters, but I still run several a day. The iTunes install on my work computer couldn’t find the album art for the Delgado’s Pelotron this morning, so I hit up Google to fix that. I was greeted by a new set of test results which I have screen capped for those interested.
Click to Embiggen
The first screen cap is the test version of the new Google Image results. It feels very much like Bing – with numerous results displayed on the page and the page working on the new infinite scroll that’s becoming popular. Gone are the pieces of visible metadata attached to each image.
Click to Embiggen
Or are they? Google has moved the metadata into a lightbox, which clears up the results a bit. Not shown in the image is just how responsive the page is. The metadata boxes pop up quickly and disappear without a fuss, not something I can say for Bing.
Click to Embiggen
And Google didn’t stop with merely recreating the Image search results, they finally moved into the modern era and got rid of the top frame in exchange for a lightbox and right-side frame. I’m not too terribly thrilled with this, as the old frame merely moved the fold while the new lightbox tactic obscures content. The upshot of the lightbox is that clicking off-image immediately brings the user to the results page.
All in all, a pretty neat set of improvements.
Like a proud parent
The above photo is notable for several reasons:
1. It is photographic evidence of me wearing pants on a weekend
2. Despite having been out of the Army for six years now, I still haven’t found t-shirts more comfortable than Army issue brown tees.
and…
3. Yes, I have the gall to hang a Doves’ Some Cities poster next to a Toulouse-Latrec print.
Oh, and that manuscript in my hand? That’s a large chunk of Project Kingdom. For those of you keeping score at home, I am currently halfway through Chapter 29 out of an outlined 40, and sitting pretty at 77,000 words written.
Formatted for editing – double-spaced 12 point Courier New – I realized that I have given birth to a doorstop. The beast is closing in on 400 pages and tips the scale at more than five pounds.
All of these details, rendered in physical form, amaze me due to one very large fact. I cannot remember starting Kingdom. It has sat dormant for the better part of the last two or three months. I like to think that those months was a period of glorious gestation, where I was somehow becoming a better writer and doing things that will better Kingdom, but honestly? If there was a Manuscript Protective Service, they would have placed Kingdom with a loving foster novelist ages ago.
Kingdom’s a survivor, though. She’s moved computers at least twice. Moved apartments. Out lasted a couple of girlfriends. I’m pretty sure that when I started Kingdom I had both a functional car and television. Hell, the beast has killed a printer and untold ink cartridges.
The index cards used for pre-writing that hang above my desk have yellowed from cigarette smoke. And I don’t even want to think about how many bottles of booze have been sacrificed to Kingdom.
Put to the question, I’d estimate that I started writing Kingdom sometime around spring 2009, but I wouldn’t swear by that.
But now, as I wait for the house to cool, and think about lining my stomach before I start throwing bourbon at it, the end feels so close. If I can crank out a measly 5000 words a week, I can wrap the first draft before September. Then, it’ll just be several hellish months of editing. But at least I’ll be able to hold the entire thing.
And after the last couple weeks, that’s damn huge.
Image by Gabriel Oliveira
I’ve been doing some thinking lately about job titles. Specifically, I think job titles need to be re-imagined to better reflect the job’s function. To that end, I propose the adoption of what I call “The Guy Title.”
For example, Joe the IT specialist will become The Computer Guy. Or if Ted specializes in keeping the network up and running, Ted becomes The Network Guy. Fred who keeps everyone’s email up and running? He’s The Email Guy.
Of course, the Guy Title system easily extends beyond the IT department.
Photographer? Meet the Camera Guy.
Web Copywriter? Web Writer Guy.
Marketing Analyst? Poll Numbers Guy.
Package Car Driver? Delivery Guy.
Pizza Delivery Driver? Pizza Guy.
It’s a pretty simple formula, and chances are you’re already using them in conversation anyway. I think, that by taking these conversational titles and turning them into official titles, employees will have a much better understanding of exactly what’s expected of them.
The Guy Title system also makes interoffice communications easier. Have a problem and you need it fixed? Shout the name of the problem and attach “Guy” and there’s little doubt who should respond.
Now, I know you’re wondering, “But what about management?” Well, that’s just as easy. Simply add a “boss” for department heads, a “suit” for division level, a “-y” for C-level positions. Thus, the Chief Marketing Officer becomes Market-y Guy. The IT Division Manager? Computer Suit Guy. Customer Service Manager? Complaint Boss Guy.
And ladies? Don’t want to be called a “Guy”? Think about it this way, if payroll is determined by job title, there’s not really anyway to be paid less for the same job.
I hear band names, and some of them don’t even know they’re bands. Prefork, The Govs, Podium California – those are just the three most recent. The names just jump out from unsuspecting places and in some quantum sense, a band forms. And I’m not the only one.
And the problem with fake band names is that once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. You start assigning genres, idiosyncrasies, member names, album art. If you know your music history – this is exactly how Def Leppard started.
Sometime over the past year, I started tweeting the band names I’d find in CAPTCHA codes at Mixx.com. And I wasn’t alone. The volume of CAPTCHA bands started to increase with new discoveries found daily. At Twitter events, I’d end up talking about CAPTCHA bands with other users – Brad Carr, Dean Browell, and Carrie Fleck being the three other local CAPTCHA band spotters.
Yesterday morning I received a DM and Facebook message from, good guy and friend of the blog, Dean Browell. He was taking the CAPTCHA band mini-meme to the next level – a Facebook Fan Page.
The idea is just as simple as the Twitter action we’d been doing for the better part of a year now, albeit in a bit longer form and benefiting from multimedia. I quickly roped Justin into the group, swallowed my rather strong dislike for Facebook, and jumped in.
So far, we’ve managed to get six CAPTCHA bands up, and I’ll include one of them below. If you’re into that whole Facebook thing, and you’d like to Fan the page, here’s a link. It’s still early, but there’s some quality stuff up there.
The Govs
Prison State
Orange County in the late seventies was known more for it’s love of disco and The Eagles than it was of the proto-punk movements developing in Detroit, London, Manchester, and New York City. But when Steve Greer’s disco-glitter band, The Lovelights, signed with Columbia Records, the teenage Lester Greer had enough.
Adopting the stage name “Butch” and teaming up with two fellow teenage ne’erdowells, the younger Greer brother launched what is arguably the first SoCal proto-punk band – The Govs. With much of the band lacking anything close to musical talent, and having spent most of their lives in the well-to-do Los Angeles suburb, the trio overcompensated with profanity and aggression.
The band’s first album, “Screw California”, was twelve adaptations of the Richard Berry classic “Louie Louie” with alternate lyrics and a tempo that clocked each track in a mere ninety seconds. But the messages, deriding the recently ended Vietnam War, the disastrous Nixon presidency, and a perceived Orwellian police state in which “the government collud[ed] with corporate interests to enslave the masses” resonated with the students of Laguna Beach High School.
The lo-fidelity honesty of the first album was quickly lost as parents of band members fronted the money for a true demo, the better known “Prison State.” Under the tutelage of a Benny Stills, a failed musician in his own right, Greer and his cohorts were put through the paces in a real studio, instructed in the use of their musical instruments, and given a basic understanding of song writing.
The experience is believed to have been detrimental to the outcome of not only the album but also the band. Produced to within an inch of its life, the Govs’ second album was derided as derivative, meritless, lacking in real world experience, and nearly causing the death of punk before the burgeoning genre was truly alive.
Several record labels professed an interest in Prison State, and it received a rather wide release. The band, however, broke up shortly after completion and thus never toured in support of the record. The impact of Prison State was far greater than any involved could have predicted, and is seen as a major influence on modern day acts such as Green Day and Nickleback.
The Joanna Newsom is out there, somewhere
What follows is an actual conversation between myself and a long-time friend, Justin Koeppen. No spelling has been corrected.
PBR: Ever listen to “The Do”?
JK: Never haves.
PBR: I was hoping they’d sound remarkably different. But they don’t, really. Female lead is kind of like Hope Sandoval, but not enough.
JK: How much more Sandovalic does she need to be?
PBR: About a 1/3rd. What unit of measure are we using?
JK: A sliding scale of preciousness that ranges from Pink to Mum.
PBR: Nice.
JK: It can also be repesented as a “Newsom”, as in “her voice is so twee she registers at 9.5 Newsoms.”
PBR: I didn’t think 9.5 Newsoms was realistically possible. I mean, it’s been mathematically proven under ideal circumstances. But get out of the lab once in a while, man
JK: Ok. So 9.8 Newsoms is theoretically possible in a pure vaccuum at or near absolute zero, and 10.0 Newsoms reaches the threshold of current science. It’s beleived that an artist with a 10.0 rating would occupy all genres simultaneously.
PBR: The God Artist, also known as the Les-Bosson particle.
JK: That’s if you subscribe to the current model of Harp String Theory.
PBR: Which, you know, I do. I could never get behind the Zepplin Field Theory
JK: Well, yesh, the physics break down as the artist approaches the event horizon, also known as the Coldplay Line, beyond which no talent can escape regardless of the force of opposing hipster cred.
PBR: I can’t abide by any school of thought that believes that Coldplay is actually inevitable. It screams of creationism, as if the boring and uninspired of the world are preaching some fanatical version of musical religious doctrine.
JK: It’s true, the musical cosmos operates much more akin to the Rolling Stones model; it began ages ago with a bang, then over billions of years colled and evened out to form a void filled with mostly empty space, continuing it’s course until it’s eventual heat death.
PBR: I’ll stick with Jenny Lewis Wave forms, which give you a really interesting quotient when you feed Kate Nash into the equation
JK: You know that’s dangerous. They tried a similar experiment in the 90s by trying to introduce a Belly variant into a stable Susan Vega waveform. that’s how we got Lisa Loeb.
PBR: But that overlooks the Costello-Dylan hypothesis, that the universe is expanding and contracting in repetition for infinity, with each action spinning off an infinite number of variants. In some parallel universes, Dylan was actually good in the 80s.
JK: Unless you believe in the Guided by Multiverse theory, wherein each song Robert Pollard pens creates it’s own parallel universe where the lyrics actually make sensen.
PBR: Bah, that theory hasn’t been used since people started to really trumpet the qualities of The Magnetic Fields Theory – in which happy songs are really sad songs, but sad songs are really sad songs too.
JK: Ah yes, the old Grandaddy era school of thought.
The New York Times recently put the rumor that they were going to erect another pay wall around their website to rest…by admitting that they are going to erect another pay wall around their site. And there’s a lot of heated discussion going on about this right now. Are they right? Are they wrong? Running the New York Times obviously costs a lot of money, and they do it well, which is why the Old Gray Lady is one of the most respected names in the media business.
But it’s a move doomed to failure. Here’s why. Information. Lots of it. Gobs of it. Today’s media landscape isn’t measured in column inches, but rather in conversations. The content of the New York Times might be the start of many of those conversations, but they rarely (if ever) manage to keep them going at the New York Times. Instead, the stories and links get passed around, take place elsewhere, spread around the net in viral tides.
And that bothers the New York Times. Not like this is a new development. Newspapers, like books, have always been shared between readers. “Hey are you done with the sport section? Yeah, trade you for the business section.” The problem is that kind of sharing is limited by scarcity. Not so online. Neither is the competition. People who do things better steal eyeballs who otherwise would have read a section of a newspaper.
Need a new futon? Craigslist that shit.
Ditto for a job.
What’s the score of the game? There’s only a million or so sites that can tell you that right now, plus give you tons of information beyond the score because all they do is sports.
Ditto for cooking, entertainment, politics, culture, and even neighborhood news.
So, instead of competing with these specialized venues (probably a bad idea) or turning the New York Times website into a destination for conversations (probably a good idea, destinations mean pages views, pages views mean ad revenue, ad revenue means continued employment), the Times went for option C – what I like to call “Hide behind a wall.”
And here’s how Option C is going to work out. At first, a lot of loyal subscribers will sign up. The initial numbers might even look promising. People are paying and coming into the castle. “We’re saved!”
You aren’t.
Your good stories, the real winners, will leak out. Everyone will read them, however they’ll completely ignore the rest of the New York Times. Your overall page impressions will fall. So will your ad revenue. Suddenly, your only source of income will be your subscribers.
And that leads us to part two. Subscribers will stop growing. Quickly. Bringing new subscribers in after that first generation will be harder. Keeping subscribers will be harder. After you erect a pay wall, there’ll be an initial vacuum in the news market. Your brand is now focusing inward, and all your former readers who wouldn’t pony up the cash few an online subscription? They’ll move on. Someone else will get them.
Eventually, your brand loyalty will wane. Current subscribers will start to leave. Getting new customers will become nigh impossible. You’ll be forced with two options – raise prices or innovate. Raising prices will drive more customers away and make getting new ones even more difficult. Innovating, well, we’ve already seen the Old Gray Lady thinks of that.
And if you still think this whole pay wall thing is a good idea? Why don’t you talk to the folks who were in charge way back in 2007, when you ended your other pay wall – TimesSelect.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.