Facebook Solves Another Crime

At noon on Friday, March 15, a burglar entered our home in Kaaawa, Hawaii.

It was one of 10 burglaries reported during the first two weeks of March in Sector 4 of the Honolulu Police Department's Windward Oahu district, a relatively thinly populated country district running from Kaaawa to Kawela Bay.

The crime itself wasn't anything special, just a run-of-the-mill burglary, in which someone broke in and "went shopping in our house." It's something that happens on Oahu 5,000 times or more in a given year.

But "our" burglary was different because a hidden camera captured several reasonably good digital photos of the burglar, caught in the act as he went through our house, and I turned to social media to identify and track him down. It led to a wild three-day experience in which the new world of technology and social media took on the old problem of everyday crime.

Smile! You're Now a Crime Statistic

It's Friday. The end of a long week. We arrived home in the late afternoon. I was first through the front door, and immediately saw that the sliding door out to the back deck was open. The cats, normally inside cats, were lounging around on the deck. It took only a few seconds to realize this meant someone had broken in.

The immediate reaction is a sinking feeling, an anticipatory sense of loss. You don't yet know what was taken, but you can imagine what it might include. And the whole process of being burglarized is doubly depressing, because after the crime and the initial sense of loss comes the bureaucracy, adding up the dollars and cents, dealing with the police, with your insurance company, then facing the decisions about what to replace, and what to just try to forget about. And then there are the "what if's." What if we had installed an alarm? What if I had stayed home that day? What if we had hidden that prized item away. What if... The self-recriminations can drag you down as much as the crime itself.

As we went through the house, the places that had been searched were pretty obvious. Drawers pulled open, containers tossed around. It makes you alternately angry, then depressed. Then it leaves you just sort of empty.

We should have called the police immediately, but it was Friday night, we were scheduled to have dinner with friends, and the burglar -- along with our stuff -- was long gone. So we waited until the next morning to call HPD. I doubt it made us great company that evening.

A Photo Finish

This isn't the first time we've been burglarized since moving to Kaaawa 26 years ago. After someone walked off with a laptop computer in 2007, I installed a small, wireless camera that automatically starts taking pictures when it detects motion in the room, and uploads them to a secret spot in the "cloud." The camera requires a wireless network to connect to the internet, but doesn't need to be connected to a computer to function.

Once the initial shock and depression wore off, I remembered the camera. Before long, I retrieved the photos, each automatically time and date stamped, and got a good sense of what had happened.

The burglar first appeared on camera about 11:52 a.m., just minutes before noon. Although burglary is usually a young man's crime, this burglar looked to be around 50. He wore dirty jeans -- as if fresh from work on a construction site -- a gray t-shirt and athletic shoes. Wrap-around sunglasses were pushed up on his head. To avoid leaving finger prints, he wore makeshift gloves made out of plastic bags that were taped over his hands. Once inside the house, he moved quickly and silently through the living room and kitchen, then moved down the hall to our bedroom, emerging several minutes later carrying a pillow case holding items he had taken. Then he made another quick look around the living room, stopping to dump a small bowl of coins -- several months of accumulated pocket change -- into the pillow case, then added a camera he spotted on a table across the room. And, finally, he made his exit out to the deck, graciously leaving the door open for the cats to enjoy. He was quick and efficient, in and out of the house within ten minutes. None of our neighbors noticed anything unusual. And the cats didn't say a word.

After first retrieving the digital photos, I printed a couple and walked the nearby streets, asking neighbors if they recognized the man. One thought the person looked familiar. I took note. Others took long looks, then shook their heads. Nothing.

So I sat down and did two things. First, I prepared a 4-by-6-inch photo of the burglar to pass out and post in the neighborhood, and sent it to Costco to have several dozen digital prints made. And then I posted the photo and a brief description of what happened on my own personal website, as well as on a website featuring occasional news about Kaaawa, with additional links posted on Twitter and Facebook.

I was stunned by the result. Even before we had a chance to pick up the printed photographs, the pictures of the burglar at work, and my call to help identify him, had gone viral. Twitter seems to have been effective in getting the word to the news media and to key opinion leaders, who then retweeted details to their own networks. But Facebook seems to have had by far the most reach, as people saw the information and reposted it, quickly taking this from a local quest to a search with national reach.

How effective was social media? Here's one indicator. The number of page views on my blog jumped from a daily average of about 2,000 to 58,857 on Sunday, and another 17,818 on Monday, undoubtedly generated by the reposting of information with links back to my original post. That's a pretty dramatic reach, achieved in just a matter of hours. And it made the difference.

Mainstream news media then picked up the story, spurred on by the online response the issue had been getting. And the broadcast news coverage, in turn, reinforced the social media presence.

A phone call came in early Sunday morning from Las Vegas, where several former Hawaii residents had compared notes and said they believed the burglar was a Hauula man. They provided his name as well as a good description of where he lives. Phone calls, emails, and online comments continued throughout the day, and into the evening, with quite a number of other people pointing to the same Hauula resident as the person in the photo. Several other names came up as well, including a former Kaaawa resident recently seen surfing nearby.

Case Solved!

It was social media that broke the case open.

Late Sunday afternoon, just 24-hours after I first posted the burglar's photo online, a man called and, without identifying himself, said he knew the person in the photo. He said he wanted to talk to him before saying more. I encouraged him to call me back any time, but wasn't sure if this was any more solid than the other leads that had been offered.

He called back a few hour later. He was, I learned, one of the burglar's brothers. He had been alerted to the photograph by a daughter living on the mainland, who saw it on Facebook and thought she recognized her uncle. With the photograph getting such broad exposure, it would have been hard for the family to look the other way. And, thankfully, they didn't.

While crowdsourcing made a tremendous contribution to getting out the word about the search for the burglar, it wasn't as successful at making the actual identification. The burglar, as it turns out, was not the Hauula man mentioned most often by those online. Instead, it was the former Kaaawa resident, identified by just a couple of people who seemed to be swimming against the tide. He was someone who had done a lot of work as a neighborhood handyman back around 2002, and who we had hired back then to do repairs on our deck. We later learned, according to rumors circulating in the neighborhood, that he might not be a novice when it comes to the art of the burglary. And now he had come back, after more than a decade.

Just before 9 p.m. on Sunday night, I was standing in our driveway, in the darkness, meeting with the burglar's brother. He said the family had confronted the man, who admitted to the burglary. He then reached into his truck and presented me with a dark pillowcase which, on later examination, was filled with almost everything that had been stolen. A few items, those with any gold content, had already been pawned, but he said the family would do their best to retrieve and return those items as well.

I believe the man's brother was genuinely humbled and deeply pained by the experience, and was telling the honest truth when he said the family is now trying to "do the right thing." He said the family had been trying to support their brother as he dealt with drug dependence and past criminal charges. It's a struggle many local families will relate to, I'm sure. But what is the "right thing" under the circumstances, for the family, for the burglar, for the victims, and for the community? I don't pretend to know. It's something we'll all be grappling with going forward.

We were obviously very lucky to solve the crime in a timely fashion, and also to get most of our stolen property back. But technology, such as our small security camera, combined with the long reach of social media, obviously provides new ways of responding to routine crimes of this kind. A small self-installed camera obviously won't provide as much protection as a commercial alarm system, and neither can provide absolute security. But it doesn't cost much and, as this has shown, can be quite effective. That said, I repeat--we were very lucky. Your mileage may vary.

Read Ian Lind's blog at iLind.net.

Why I Share My Closet With Hundreds of Women

For TueNight.com by Margit Detweiler


Gwynnie Bee CEO Christine Hunsicker (Photo: Margit Detweiler/TueNight)

"I'd size down, for sure -- it runs big," says Mara, a Gwynnie Bee staffer. She sits behind a makeshift checkout table eyeing me as I hold up a sheer, floral-patterned top. "We're about the same size I think?"

I'm trying on a handful of shirts, at bargain basement prices, here at Gwynnie Bee's second anniversary party in founder Christine Hunsicker's Manhattan apartment. I can't resist a good deal. More often I'm perusing online, on Gwynnie Bee's near-revolutionary shopping site for plus-sized women.

The two-year-old company (three if you count the years Hunsicker spent conceiving it) is like Netflix for clothing; your "closet" is akin to your "queue." You choose a one-10-piece-out-at-a-time plan and closet the clothes you like. (Yes, in the GB community parlance, "closet" is used as a verb.) When you're done wearing an item, you toss it back in a USPS, pre-postage-paid blue bag they provide (no washing necessary) and they'll ship you your next item. They launder everything meticulously and retire clothing when it's even slightly worn, so if you don't mind sharing clothes with strangers, you're good.

Actress Ashlie Atkinson (Rescue Me, Bored to Death and the forthcoming Us & Them), whom I met at the last GB event, shared a tip with me:

"I tend to accumulate things wherever I go," says Atkinson. "So in order to have cute things to wear on trips and extra room for souvenirs, I always pack as many Gwynnie Bee items and blue mailer bags as I can."

Before she returns home she just uses the prepaid mail bags to return the worn clothes. "Voila! More room in the suitcase!"

At the risk of sounding like an ad, I've been a member for the last year or so, so I'll vouch for being 100 percent biased. I freaking love it. As a woman who wears plus-sized clothes, it's always a struggle (or at the very least, time-consuming) to find clothing that looks good, for a good price that has any sense of style. Friends say, "I got such a deal at Uniqlo!" or "Have you been to Joe Fresh?" -- seemingly oblivious to the fact that those stores carry no higher than a 14 (and a skinny 14 at that). Shopping is often a carefully strategized, often stressful trip to a department store's dowdy collection or an expensive and time-consuming online perusal.

Enter Gwynnie Bee, the monthly clothing subscription service that stocks sizes 10-34 and curates a collection of trendy mid-market finds. You can choose from designers like DKNY, Three Dots and IGIGI to pricier Anna Scholz and Kiyonna to Canadian vintage-look designer Cherry Velvet. The prices aren't cheap (e.g. you can have three garments out at a time for $79 a month), but comparatively you can move more pieces of clothing through your wardrobe than the cost of one dress.

As a fan of GB, I wanted to chat with the 36-year-old Hunsicker -- turns out she's a fellow Pennsylvanian girl -- and find out more about the brain behind the brand.

A Princeton grad, Hunsicker started her career in tech start-ups. (Gotham Gal has a great write-up on Hunsicker's background, pre GB). Ambitious and hungry for experience, she worked her way to the top at advertising company Right Media, until Yahoo acquired them in 2007 for $850 million dollars. She describes a "quick turnaround project" at Drop.io, which was acquired by Facebook after only five months. Ready for her own project, she soon turned her attention to something more hive-minded.

Speaking from experience, having a service that's solely dedicated to the plus-size market is pretty special.  I always have to break it to straight-sized pals that this isn't for them. What made you decide to focus on this market?

The choices for plus are horrible. Plus-size women are three times more likely to shop online, not by choice, frankly, but because there are very few brick and mortar options -- and they're pretty crappy experiences. When you look at the statistics, and realize how much of the population actually fits in size 10 and above, and that it's the overwhelming majority of the population? It doesn't make any sense. Everyone else is focused everywhere else. We can really make an impact.

There have been a couple of other ah-ha moments. When you're putting on 10-15 lbs and your clothes don't fit the way they did before but you really don't want to go out and buy anything, because you're not accepting the extra weight? It's convenient to move up and down in sizes seamlessly but it's also a self-esteem thing. If it looks good because it fits properly, I feel better about myself.

You've been able to build a strong community of members and supporters for your site it seems. The comments in the ratings section of the site are sometimes hilariously insightful  -- they don't hold back.

We really look at our members as an extension of our product group. We're pretty good at letting our members be totally transparent with us. You can tell us we screwed up shipping. You can tell us you don't like our styles. You can tell us we've let you down because you haven't had the color green three launches in a row. And you can post it publicly. What you can't do is say anything bad about another member. A lot of our staff are members and we hired some of our members to come in and do customer service because they were so enthusiastic about stuff it carried us forward.

What appealed to you about the sharing economy model?

Two reasons -- one that's emotional and another that's utilitarian. On the utilitarian front, you can't buy all the things you want. Even if you could, it's wasteful. It's just so much cheaper to have a much bigger wardrobe and share it among other people. Essentially you're raising the utilization of the core good in the economy; each person can pay a sliver in order to get the same kind of value out of it. I like the efficiency.

From an emotional standpoint, the fact that you can wear so many more clothes in so many different prints and take more risks? It makes clothing so much more fun.

When you think about whether you're going to buy something, there's a pretty high consideration barrier. Does it fit perfectly? Can I afford it? Does it go with other things that I have? What does this piece of clothing say about me? How many more months can I wear it before the season turns over. Are people going to recognize over and over again? With our model all you have to do is say, "Do I like it enough to try it?" And that to me is such an easier question to answer.

You certainly have the business plan nailed down. And you never got an MBA?

No, I did a bunch of start-ups instead. In my opinion you can get an MBA in a classroom, which is usually valuable from a networking standpoint, or you can get one on the job. If you're willing to take a ton of risk, you can join a three-person startup that may totally fall on its face -- you can get an MBA that way too. I remember calling home to my parents after I quit my first job. I was a strategic financial analyst -- a very steady job but very stressful in its own way. My mom and dad understood that career path. When I told them I was joining a start-up, they were like "what are you doing? You're taking a 50 percent cut in salary!" They couldn't understand the risk element. I was like it's ok, I'll eat ramen noodles and Campbell's soup -- it's fine. It was such a foreign concept to them. Every week they'd call and ask how the company was doing and I'd say, "It's failing, it's failing spectacularly." You can learn a lot that way and have the scars to show for it. That was my approach.

When we first met, you told me about how an ever-changing closet of clothing was kind of in your DNA?

My aunt was a seamstress and she would make outfits for her daughter and me. My cousin and I would swap and trade clothing -- this went on essentially until I went to college. We never wore anything twice. We would then take our clothes to a consignment shop and sell it, get money to buy more material at Jo-Ann's fabrics and my aunt would make us something new. So I grew up around patterns and sewing and experimentation with clothing. I never knew my size because my aunt would just buy patterns and tweak them for me. Everything always fit so I never had that experience of going in and trying on clothes that weren't going to work for me. They weren't fancy clothes, but I was very very spoiled. When I left for college and I suddenly had to start buying clothes, I hated it. Nothing fit!

You're not plus-sized yourself are you?

I'm a big weight fluctuator. I've been in sizes 16 and 18 before. I'm happy to be where I am now, but I have no illusions that it's a permanent thing. My best friend is plus-size and I know how hard it is for her to find clothing. I still actually can't convince her to become a member. She's still in this, "I don't want any clothes" kind of mindset. I don't think women need to feel bad about themselves -- and that's what we're trying to change. We want to promote a very body positive culture.

And the name Gwynnie Bee -- where did that come from?

Not a great story around that. I wanted to do a children's book series. The main character was named Gwynstance. I was a strong-willed seven-year old.

Read more of Margit Detweiler's "MidgeMadge" column on TueNight. You can find her on Twitter @Margit.

About TueNight:
TueNight is a weekly online publication for women to share where they've been and explore where they want to go next. We are you, part two. www.tuenight.com

Why Right Now the Future Belongs to Google, Not Apple

When I first read that Google, the company that seems to know everything about us, was swooping in to acquire Nest, the company that strives to make home automation a cinch, for a hefty $3.2 billion, it wasn't the money that left me stunned, the amount is now only a sixth of what Facebook recently splurged; it was something else.

A company which began operating out of a garage 15 years ago, with a humble search engine as its only offering, has suddenly become the epicenter of our digital universe. Even before I could realize, Search was omnipresent, Chrome was my gateway to the web, Gmail was my go-to email service, YouTube was called upon to catch up on missed episodes, Maps was summoned every time I stepped into an unknown territory, Drive was backing up my photos as soon as I clicked them, and my brilliant Nexus 5 simply became an extension of myself.

Google had taken over, even before I could press pause.

The search giant has infiltrated almost every sphere of our digital interaction and made the experience richer, more satisfying and rather beautiful. Their suite of services simply feels all-encompassing, with your Google ID being the key to a thousand doors. There are many big-name brands which often try to achieve this, but either their endeavor feels too intrusive or they just fail without a whimper.

This one though, this particular one, seems to be nailing it.

Why the Nest acquisition seems like a watershed event is because of the avenue Google is trying to open up  --  this is not your game-changing smartphone app, or an eye-popping web service, but a solid tangible product that Google aims to weave into its ecosystem. It's their first foray into something so different from their core services, something which is popularly and rather pompously called the Internet of Things. Yes, you could almost hear the cacophony around the term settle down as soon as this acquisition was made, and another multi-billion dollar industry was born.

And with this, Google one upped all its rivals, all in one fell swoop.

Offhand, it's rash to say that Google is winning the race. To better discern the tussle within the Valley, many files need to be decoded.

Stuck in 1 Infinite Loop

The address of Apple's headquarters seems to typify its dilemma somewhat accurately. To begin with, they have vehemently refused to liberalize its notorious iTunes software, sadly our only (legal) way to get data flowing to and from an iOS device. Only the other day I had to restore my iPad to its original state and trusted iTunes to run the errand for me. I use the word "trusted" because I was not trying to attempt something which Apple throttles me to. After wasting a lot of time and a handful of bandwidth, iTunes refused to install the software package it had downloaded  --  iOS 6.1.3. It was only later that I realised that Apple had a peculiar penchant for not allowing even a slightly outmoded version of iTunes to download their latest version of iOS  --  iOS 7 in this case. And since Apple's servers are hardcoded to prevent anyone from legally installing any other OS than their newest one, their trusted lieutenant iTunes was denied permission to install it on my iPad.

Ingenious. Shrewd. Dumb.

For all their attention to detail and obsession with precision crafted products, all Apple could have done is have iTunes give me a short staccato message asking for an update in order to restore my iPad. Simple.

But iTunes is only a small part of the argument. If a company is making more money than the whole of Microsoft from only one of their products, it must be doing something right.

The iPhone. It enjoys an exalted status among the sea of smartphones, maybe because it started the juggernaut, and warrants a beefy study of its own.

When Steve Jobs asked his engineers to design a phone which doesn't require physical buttons to receive and end calls, they didn't know what had hit them. But it was precisely this level of brilliance and skill which Jobs demanded that gave birth to one of the most iconic devices in world history, a cult classic. On June 29, 2007, Apple effectively blew every phone manufacturer's socks off and left consumers in awe. The media went as far as calling it the "Jesus phone." It is conjectured that Android, now the world's most used smartphone OS, is said to have been tweaked generously following the iPhone's announcement.

It's not difficult to see why. A touchscreen which renounced styli, pinch to zoom, flick to scroll; it was almost bewildering why such beautifully simple innovations ever evaded the developers' mind. Suddenly, the competition's best offerings looked like a tribute to a bygone era. Apple had done to the smartphone what they had accomplished with the MP3 player. They had changed the game yet again. Everyone wanted an iPhone.

But seven years, half a billion iPhones and the sad demise of a CEO later, Apple is, let's admit it, starting to look jaded. It's almost like that venerated magician who seems to have run out of tricks & keeps running the same show to please gullible children.

It's easy to say that a new iPhone still generates the kind of hysteria which any other phone could only dream of. But truth to be told, even if Apple sat on its haunches and re-branded the iPhone 5s as the iPhone 6 this fall, it would still sell in the same, if not better numbers.

The company which took the world by storm with its revolutionary iPhone 4 has sadly skimped on true innovation ever since. We had expected iPhone 4S to be as groundbreaking as its predecessor. Much to our chagrin though, 4S suffered first from a rejigged launch cycle & second, from the absence of anything even remotely breathtaking. Admit it, Siri is a fizzled firework.

Apple's creation seemed all the more uninspiring when only a few months ago, Samsung had launched the Galaxy SII, a widely acclaimed device which heralded the onslaught of Android.

Jobs departed only a couple of days after the 4S was unveiled. Amid the torrent of due encomiums, it was secretly rumored that he was in fact working on the iPhone 5, and that the 4S was always supposed to be a minor update. "Great" I thought, dismissing the 4S as a mere aberration in Apple's glorious pedigree of devices.

Longer screen, slimmer profile, chamfered edges: iPhone 5 --  aging wine in a shiny new bottle.

The sheen had come off, and the Apple's magnum opus had slipped from being the industry's gold standard to something that was more in demand for the bitten fruit seared on its back.

With the iPhone 5c, Apple employed what seems like one of their more devious marketing moves  --  Pulling the plug on a classier ex flagship and sneaking in a plastic toy in its place only to make the current, more expensive flagship look more covetous. Whatever happened to creating a groundbreaking product and letting it speak for itself?

Don't get me wrong  --  I am a huge fan of their iMacs and Macbooks and the gorgeous new Mac Pro. I think OS X is still the desktop OS to beat. And with the iPad mini, they've nailed the mini tablet like it's the best thing since sliced bread. I wish, alas, that I could say the same about iOS7 as well. It's full of bugs, the animations are choppy, the gradients are whacked out and it looks like it's been designed keeping the kitschy iPhone 5c in mind. It's funny, almost cartoonish.

But again, Apple sells. It sells its wares in huge numbers, like HUGE. The iMac recently completed 30 years and Apple did their best to cash in on the occasion. Financially at least, things were looking skywards.

Investors were expecting outstanding returns from Apple's Q4 2013 sales. They were left disappointed, once again; and their stock dipped once again, and once again Tim Cook came out and proclaimed that they have some great stuff lined up for the year. Good old rhetoric.

Some argue that Apple is paying the price for their "walled garden" approach, while others quip that Apple's mojo departed with Jobs. I just think that they've been averse to taking risks while the competition has leapfrogged way ahead.

Their loyalists might call it an Apples to Oranges comparison; eerily though, Apple's logo is almost beginning to look like an accidentally designed prophecy symbolizing a healthy bite taken out of their monopoly.

Right Out of the Window

They launched a tablet when it was still a term used mostly for therapeutic advice, their smartphone OS once powered almost every touchscreen phone in the market. Its desktop OS was loved by users and praised by critics, and its portable music player was being billed as the definitive iPod killer.

Years later, the Surface tablet is still finding its feet in the tablet market, Windows Phone 8 is still just warming up, Windows 8 has been criticized by users and well, critics, and the Zune has completely ceased to exist.

So where did Microsoft, a brand which inspired fierce devotion, and in its heyday, had people queuing up to buy the next best version of Windows, go wrong?

They got hung (pun intended) on a BSOD obsessed Windows Vista. Yes, nothing else.

Why, you ask? So after developing a rock solid and visually pleasant Windows XP, Microsoft and their developers merrily incubated the next version of Windows, only to come out after half a decade with an OS which was half as robust as its predecessor, had scorn inducing issues with software and hardware compatibility, and consumed more memory than most could afford.

It had without a doubt received a fresh coat of paint (those hate-it-or-love-it frosted glass effects) and looked nothing like Windows XP. But, alas, if it isn't skin deep, it isn't beauty. Unsurprisingly then, it was widely panned not only for its shortcomings but also for how it ripped off Mac OS X in some ways. The contempt against Vista reached a crescendo when OEMs had to bow to users' demands to downgrade their newly purchased computers from Vista to XP.
3D icons was Vista's leitmotif.

It was a jolt to Microsoft, like a stationary Bentley being hit by an invisible force, like a giant been wrenched out of a bad dream. Only, it wasn't a dream. They knew that quick amends were in order and soon got back to their drawing board to unveil, two years down the line, Windows 7. It was widely adopted by the still wailing users of Windows Vista and smugly accepted by Windows XP loyalists. Pride salvaged, Microsoft thought.

What they didn't realize was that they had totally, entirely and comprehensively missed the bus which carried a huge placard saying "Smartphones and tablets this way. So long computers!"

So when smartphones and tablets did eventually take over and computer sales dwindled, Microsoft was like a deer caught in the headlights. It was unbelievable. They had failed to spot a trend which is cannibalizing the market they thrive on. They were in daze, clueless and hapless.

Enter Windows 8, Microsoft's ambitious move to unite phones, computers and tablets. Can one really do that? Maybe sometime in the future, or maybe never, but with the existing ecosystem, certainly not today. Windows 8 seems to be suffering the same disdain as Vista, with users clamoring for the traditional Windows experience over the pastel dyed one which Microsoft is desperately trying to push down everyone's throat. It's almost too radical a change for an average Joe coming off Windows 7. They've already issued a bevy of updates to assuage customers, but Windows 8's vision and an average PC user's utilitarian needs simply do not fall in line.

Of course their Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT are doing a good job of running its hardware but here's a blunt truth -- ever since the market for handheld devices exploded, Microsoft has always been playing catch-up. Why? One, their Windows Phone OS arrived a little too late and that too half baked --  no copy paste remember? Second, the much needed updates have been terribly scant. For comparison, Android received at least 3 major updates in the last year and a half, while Windows Phone basically stagnated. It's excruciatingly hard, as they realise now, to proselytize an Android or iOS user into an altogether different ecosystem.

Nokia, Microsoft's obtainment, is trying to keep afloat with a heavily forked version of Android in Nokia X. What defies logic is their plan to lure users to a high end Windows Phone device if they savour using the company's mid-range droid. Wouldn't I just buy a high end Droid from the competition's offerings instead? Best of luck Elop. But the Finns have to be lauded for pulling out all stops and creating Android totting handsets which most consumers hoped for but never quite expected. Also, it'll be interesting to see how this Android experiment pans out under Microsoft's umbrella when the acquisition becomes official sometime later this year. But I digress.

The question remains  -- why couldn't a company of Microsoft's scale and resources, despite their best efforts, could do nothing to stem first, the ebbing PC sales, and then the user base lost to Apple and Google.

The rot for Microsoft started soon after Bill Gates went out figuring waterless toilets and free vaccines while heads like Tim Cook and Larry Page spent every waking second of their lives on driving growth in their organizations. Steve Ballmer's bombastic mannerisms (never before or since has a CEO leapt out of a cake at a company bash!), scathing product reviews which often left the developers shattered and the products scrapped, and the lack of a fresh perspective has eroded a chunk of their core user base. He's a sales guy heading a tech company after all! "Maybe I'm an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on," Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal. "As much as I love everything about what I'm doing," he added, "the best way for Microsoft to enter a new era is a new leader who will accelerate change."

2013 will go down in history as the year when Mac sales finally overtook PC sales. And Apple should pat themselves for this because even after all its foibles Windows still rules the roost when it comes to market share, and it will, in all probability continue to do so for years to come, just without the halo around a newly purchased PC.

Satya Nadella, the newly crowned CEO of the tech giant has already proved his mettle in the cloud and enterprise division of Microsoft and has his task cut out. He has reiterated that Microsoft needs to reinvent itself in a "cloud and mobile first world." Led by someone who has risen through the ranks, and shepherded by the genial Gates himself, Microsoft is expected to shed all baggage and begin afresh, looking for new peaks to conquer, in weather that is at best, inclement. The climb will still be a steep one.

Mudit is an engineer, analyst and writer. Register for the soon to be launched ProsePot.com

Advice Too Secret to Ignore

Col. Manners Answers Your Questions on CIA Practices, Proper Cyberwar Behavior, and Invasion Etiquette

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

[Editor’s note: Our old friend Colonel Manners (ret.) made his first appearance at TomDispatch last October.  Today, he’s back for the third time.  We have yet to run into anyone more knowledgeable in the mores, manners, and linguistic habits of the national security state.  His CV (unfortunately redacted) would blow you away.  At a time of heightened tension among the U.S. Intelligence Community, the White House, Congress, and the American people, who better to explain the workings and thought patterns of the inner world of official Washington than the Colonel?  Once again, he answers the questions of ordinary citizens about how their secret government actually works.  Among advice columnists, he's a nonpareil.  Here's just a sampling of his answers to recent correspondence.]

Dear Col. Manners,

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he insisted that we “look forward,” not backward.  While he rejected the widespread use of torture and abuse by the CIA in the Bush years, his Department of Justice refused to prosecute a single torture case, even when death was the result.  (The only CIA agent to go to jail during the Obama presidency was the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA torture program!) 

Jump ahead five years, and instead of looking forward, it seems that we’re again looking backward big time.  The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, usually the staunchest backer of U.S. intelligence, seems to have sworn a vendetta against the CIA on the Senate floor for spying on her oversight committee as it prepared its still-unreleased report on the Agency’s torture program.  The CIA denies it all and claims committee staffers spied on them.  Once again, the Justice Department faces the issue of charges over the Agency’s torture program!  It seems like little short of a constitutional catfight.

What gives, Colonel?  Shouldn’t President Obama have prosecuted CIA torturers in the first place and isn’t it time that he and his Justice Department finally take all this to court?

Tortured in Tacoma

Dear Tortured,

You’ve hit the nail on the head!  When Senator Feinstein turns on the CIA, the situation couldn’t be more disturbing -- or out of hand.  But believe me, the answer is not to call on the Justice Department (of all places!) to sort this out.  After all, as you indicate, it was incapable of prosecuting the killing of tortured prisoners, so it’s hardly likely to adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude toward either the CIA or the Senate Intelligence Committee over possible computer spying. 

Instead, as the president long ago suggested, we need to look forward, not backward.  And with that in mind, Senator John McCain has, I believe, made the most useful suggestion: that an independent investigative body be empaneled to get to the bottom of the dispute between Feinstein and the CIA.  As you know, over the last five years, the Senate Intelligence Committee has managed to write a still-incomplete report on the CIA’s black sites and torture campaign.  Though unreleased to the public even in redacted or summary form, it is reportedly 6,300 pages long.  By comparison, the first novel in history, the Tale of Genji, is only 1,200 pages, and War and Peace only 1,800 pages.  (And yes, Tortured, we in the secret world do have a certain attraction to fiction.)

You can do the math.  Let’s say that it takes months to empanel that committee and get it up to speed.  Among other things, its members will need to read that 6,300-page report and the 6.2 million documents on its interrogation program and related matters that the CIA also reputedly turned over to the committee. (That, of course, doesn’t include the videos of its interrogations that the Agency destroyed back in 2005 because they took up too much shelf space.)  Sorting through this sort of documentation will take time.  Let’s conservatively estimate that the panel doesn’t finish hearing witnesses and going over documents until mid-2015.  Next, it has to write up its report, which will obviously have to be more than 6,300 pages long.  It, in turn, will have to be read and vetted by numerous people in the intelligence community and elsewhere before it can be made public, lest someone find blood on their hands.

A reasonable time estimate for the whole process? Perhaps a heavily edited and redacted summary of the panel’s findings could see the light by late 2017 by which time -- and here’s the great benefit -- passions will have cooled, some of the participants will be dead, and the rest of us will have other things on our minds than a panel reporting on possible crimes committed in relation to a report about possible crimes committed a decade and a half earlier.  In short, this is a stellar example of effective long-term problem-solving the national security way.

Yours looking forward,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

I thought you were the only one!  Now, thanks to the nine zillionth document in the Edward Snowden revelations and journalist Peter Maass, I discovered that the National Security Agency has its own secret advice columnist who writes “Ask Zelda,” focusing on dear-to-the-NSA topics like what to do if your boss is spying on you. 

My question is this: Were you disappointed to discover that you had company and has “Zelda” stolen your thunder?

Blindsided in Biloxi

Dear Blindsided,

Actually, despite what you might imagine, “Zelda” and I are good friends.  In fact, the community of advice columnists inside the national security world is a very close-knit crew.  We even have a social group we jokingly call the Redacted Lonely Hearts Club Band.  We meet every Friday for happy hour at a local bar (name redacted) to exchange notes.  Zelda was indeed recently “outed” in the Snowden carnage.  I wouldn’t want to out other national security advice columnists, but it is a shame that most Americans don't have access to their everyday wisdom.  I can tell you that the CIA’s columnist is not only smart as a tack, but hilarious as well.  His offhand comments at our Friday gatherings regularly leave me in stitches.  “Advice from the Dark Side,” his column in the Bush years, was a national security hit.

Believe me, living in the shadows as we all do, our community desperately needs advice.  The hundreds of thousands of us (including private contractors) in the secret world often have no one to turn to.  We certainly can’t talk about our problems in your world, and yet issues of manners, mores, or morals arise all the time, and we often have no one to consult.  That’s why, in addition to Zelda, just about every secret outfit has an advice columnist. 

I can assure you that if Edward Snowden had reached out to Zelda he would never have become a Russian pawn.

Yours advisedly,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

My head’s spinning and I thought you might be able to straighten me out.  Vice-Admiral Michael Rogers, the nominee to be the new head of the National Security Agency, recently appeared before Congress and testified that aggressive cyberwar capabilities won’t simply be located in a single cyber command.  Instead, all the major combat commands of the U.S. military will soon have their own “dedicated” cyberforces and each will be capable of launching cyberattacks. 

Say it ain’t so, Colonel!  I know that every service wants a piece of every budgetary and operational pie, but isn’t it crazy to spread the ability to launch an aggressive cyberattack around widely?

Head Spun in Houston

Dear Head Spun,

It’s not crazy at all.  It’s the height of good sense.  Recently, while testifying about the collection of the phone data of Americans, Vice-Admiral Michael Rogers said, “One of my challenges as the director, if confirmed, is how do we engage the American people, and by extension their representatives, in a dialogue in which they have a level of comfort as to what we are doing and why.”  Quite right!  So let me lend a hand in that process.

I understand where you’re coming from, and I’d like to explain why the ability to launch a cyberattack can’t be spread widely enough in our military (and possibly beyond).  Response time on a cyberattack is everything.  If you’ve ever been inside Washington's bureaucracy, you know that anything not located at your fingertips is functionally not located anywhere.  Let’s say that U.S. Navy intelligence detects a North Korean plot to attack some aspect of its cyber-domains.  If that service has its own cyber command, then it’s instant, preemptive obliteration for North Korea's cyberwarriors.  If the Navy has to make its way through a labyrinth of military or civilian bureaucracies to get a decision on when and how to act, the North Koreans might be steering a couple of our aircraft carriers before anything gets done. 

Spend your career in Washington and you’ll discover soon enough that these are the realities.  In fact, you’ll be interested -- and now undoubtedly relieved -- to know that among the options being explored by U.S. cyber experts is the possibility of providing dedicated cyberforces to the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the EPA, the IRS, and possibly even Head Start.  (What, just to take an obvious example, if a group of disgruntled tax-paying cyberterrorists is plotting to launch a first strike on the IRS?)

"Be prepared" isn’t just a saying for boy scouts -- not any more, not on our new, totally connected, and remarkably dangerous cyberplanet.

Head straightly yours,

Col. Manners (ret.)

***

Dear Col. Manners,

Honestly, what gives?  Since Vlad Putin sent his troops into the Crimea, it seems like every American official from the president on down has called what he did a gross violation of international law.  It is, of course, but I haven’t seen “international law” invoked this often in Washington in my lifetime.

How time flies (if you’ll excuse a note of sarcasm).  It seems like only yesterday that the Geneva Conventions were being called “quaint” by American officials, that we were invading another country (nowhere near our border) on trumped up weapons of mass destruction charges, and that there were all those not-so-internationally accepted acts we were enthusiastically involved in.  (You know, setting up black sites, Abu Ghraib, torture, kidnappings, etc.)  More recently, to offer just a couple of examples, the president has been ordering the drone killings of American citizens based on a Department of Justice legal finding so secret it has yet to be made public, and his officials, according to the New York Times, have seconded the Bush administration in claiming that a bill of rights-style international agreement the U.S. signed onto in 1995 does not apply to our treatment of anyone outside the boundaries of the United States.  This is evidently an internationally unique interpretation of that document. 

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a local lawyer and not especially enamored of “international law,” but really, what is it?  Is the law ours to determine or is it the international community’s?  Can we really have it both ways, depending on whether we’re doing the bad things or they are?  You tell me.

Local Law Man from Baltimore

Dear Local Law Man,

There's a “law” you ignore in comparing Russian and U.S. actions.  Call it the law of exceptionally good intentions.  Manners and intent do matter, whether in our personal lives or in international invasions.  I’ve noticed, for instance, that John Kerry has been taken to the woodshed by critics for supporting the invasion of Iraq in the Senate back in 2002 and then making this statement about Russian actions in the Crimea: “You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.”

This is a typically bum rap for our secretary of state.  Our invasion of Iraq and the recent Russian troop movements into Ukraine shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.  Admittedly, we launched a war that killed many on the basis of a nonexistent arsenal of weaponry, while Russian troops crossed an international border in an intervention in which, so far, no one has died.  Still, the difference lies in the intentions of the invading parties.  Think of it as invasion etiquette.  Even when, as in Iraq, a U.S. invasion results in massive collateral damage and mistakes are made, they are honest ones taken with the best of intentions to bring freedom and democracy to peoples under tyranny.  This is commendable, whatever the results, and highlights the exceptional nature of our country.

Who would claim the same for the Russians (except of course, the Russians)?  In fact, when it comes to the rest of the so-called international community, it’s remarkable how seldom genuine good intentions are mixed up with aggressive acts.  For them, the constraints of international law are crucial.  For the United States, international law might be thought of as a luxury item.  Since we can be relied on to do our best, whatever the circumstances, we can naturally be left free to pick and choose among international law, national law, and a growing body of well-thought-out secret law, depending on the situation.

Yes, we make mistakes; yes, there are bad eggs in any basket; but please, this is the United States of America!  Don’t get all legalistic on us.

From the well-intentioned,

Col. Manners

Tom Engelhardt (who lent Colonel Manners a hand) is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. 

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4 Things Toffler Got Wrong -- And Why it Matters Today

Even the best futurologists get certain key things wrong. Looking back, their mistakes are more revealing than what they got right. They teach us above all the continuity of human experience -- and paradoxically they highlight the enormous force of the things that do change -- how incredibly strong they have been to break free of the gravitational pull of historical inertia. Let's look at the four vital things that Alvin Toffler got wrong in 1980:

The Decline of the Market Economy

Toffler believed that industrial society split apart production and consumption and turned the world into one gigantic market. "The human race has been busy constructing a worldwide exchange network -- a market -- for at least 10,000 years. In the past 300 years, ever since the Second Wave [industrialization] began, this process has roared forward at very high speed. Second Wave civilization 'marketized' the world. Today ... this process is coming to an end."

Toffler proposed that the economy consisted of two sectors. "Sector A comprises all the unpaid work done by people for themselves, their families, or their communities." Sector B was the market economy. Industrialization expanded sector B enormously, at the expense of Sector A. But this, he said, was about to change:

The enormous energies previously poured into building the world market system becomes available for other human purposes ... [there] will flow a limitless array of civilizational changes. New religions will be born. Works of art on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Fantastic scientific advances. And, above all, wholly new kinds of social and political institutions.

... third wave [post-industrial] civilization turns out to make many features -- decentralized production, appropriate scale, renewable energy, de-urbanization, work in the home, high levels of prosumption ... that actually resemble first world societies.

'Prosumption' was the word Toffler coined for the reunion of production and consumption -- as when consumers do some or all of the work of production. To some extent Toffler was observing a real trend that has continued -- for example, DIY, self-help, the extension of self-service into many industries (for example, the IKEA furniture chain, where customers select, transport, and assemble their own furniture). We can see the same trend in the recent development of "roundtables" for entrepreneurs and the marketing industry, in particular, where professionals help and learn from each other.

But Toffler was completely wrong to think these moves would occur largely outside the market mechanism, or start to supplant it.

Partly that was because he got his history wrong. He saw pre-industrial societies as largely self-sufficient -- the 'manor' would grow food that the people on the manor would themselves consume. Yet the great breakthrough, that started developing in the fourteenth century, was the end of this miserable system of feudalism, and the growth instead of what historians call 'money agriculture' -- that is, production for the market. This great innovation came from the cities that grew enormously in size, independence, and inhabitants, from the fifteenth century onward. Traders organized markets -- literally, weekly markets for meat and vegetables, in market town squares -- and encouraged those who owned land to bring their produce to market. This was the start of modern prosperity, leading to rapid acceleration in wealth, helping to trigger the process of industrialization that hugely enlarged national and world markets.

As economist Adam Smith observed in 1776, what drives the increase in wealth is specialization, and specialization is limited by the size of the market. Building a bigger market enables every region and every country -- and nowadays, every firm and every individual -- to concentrate on what they can do best. Trade creates enormous wealth, because it decreases the cost of producing an item and accelerates the development of better products through specialization and innovation.

In fact, since Toffler wrote in 1980s, we have seen an enormous expansion in the size of the market. Toffler estimated that when he wrote only a quarter of the world's inhabitations were truly in the market system. Today, with the collapse of communism and the progressive inclusion of China, India, and many other countries in the world market economy, perhaps three-quarters of the world's people are within the system. This is directly associated with economic growth and the progressive reduction of poverty in the world.

And in the leading economies -- the only ones that have experienced his "third wave" to any strong degree -- the rise of "prosumption" has enlarged rather than limited the size of the market. People who read self-help books have created an important new segment of the publishing industry. And the rise of self-help has not doomed the therapy industry -- people do it themselves and also use outside help. The rise and rise of self-service -- supermarkets, gas stations, IKEA, budget airlines, Dell -- has been associated with the rise of new corporations and a greater extension of the market, as the cost of goods and services fall.

Whenever there is innovation, the market expands yet further. Prices fall, the quality and range of goods and services increases, and consequently the market gets bigger still.

Markets are one of the main engines of progress, and not just economic progress. Increased specialization can mean increased freedom, tapping the creativity of every individual, enabling us all to create something unique and useful to other people. Without specialization and increased market size we would not have had cheap clothing, inexpensive cars, progressively lower food costs, the Beatles, the personal computer, the internet, the iPod, or Oprah.

The Decline of Cities

Toffler predicted "the shift of work from both office and factory back into the home". Consequently cities would become less important. This has been a familiar, romantic theme of futurologists for a long time. The only thing is, it never happens. More people live in cities than ever before -- and this is one of the longest running trends in history, stretching back to when we emerged from our caves.

Why does the predicted eclipse of the city never happen?

One answer is that as world markets increase, more and more people in the developing world gravitate to cities, as industry increases. Industry has always been an urban phenomenon. There might be less industry today in the rich countries, as it shifts to places with lower cost labor. But there is more in places such as China and India, and their cities are mushrooming, just as those in England did in the last 300 years.

But cities in the rich countries -- those of the post-industrial world -- are still growing too. Why is that?

It is because cities are where we learn. We learn to perfect a particular form of expertise. Why does Hollywood, a tiny area of space in the world, dominate its movie industry? Why is finance concentrated in cities such as London, New York, Frankfurt, and Tokyo? In theory, since markets are now digital, financiers could be anywhere in the world. But they concentrate, because they network, they learn from each other, and they need to be in the city. So it goes. Most of the world's aircraft are made in Seattle or Toulouse. Most high fashion comes from Milan or Paris. Most innovation in software and high-tech comes from Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Look, I prefer to live in the countryside. But wealth creation is urban. As economist Robert Hall says, a city and boom are the same thing, one in space, the other in time. And most learning still happens face to face. The city is where people meet and compound knowledge.

Dramatic Political Change

"In Second Wave societies," Toffler wrote, "voting to determine the popular will provided an important source of feedback for the ruling elites ... For a de-massified Third Wave society the feedback systems of the industrial past are entirely too crude ... Instead of seeking simpleminded yes-or-no votes, we need to identify potential trade-offs with questions like: 'If I give up my position on abortion, will you give up yours on defense spending or nuclear power?' "

Of course, this has not happened. Electoral reform has been slow, and, ironically, sometimes rejected by the voters, as when UK electors recently voted against proportional representation, which would have increased representation for minorities.

Yet this is a different kind of error by Toffler. It wasn't that he got the trend and logic wrong. There is no doubt that political parties everywhere are becoming less popular, less in touch with the general population, and that politicians are less esteemed that before. Fewer people join parties. Political opinion is more volatile, and new parties can spring up, flourish, and then decline as quickly as they grew. Our voting systems are out of joint with reality.

But that doesn't mean that change is easy or inevitable. The truth is, nobody has yet devised a better way of doing things. And it is not all the politicians' fault either. The media are making it hard for any self-respecting person, who values a degree of privacy and does not have the hide of a rhino, to enter politics and serve the people. There is unfinished business in history.

Sweeping Replacement of One World Civilization By Another

With a simplistic view that ultimately derives from Marx, Toffler made three critical assumptions. He assumed that one economic civilization replaces another. He assumed that one economic system would eventually triumph everywhere around the world. He also assumed that economics determines culture. All three assumptions are wrong -- yet it is all too easy for us to fall into the same trap.

The metaphor of one wave sweeping away another implies that each successive system, after a struggle, replaces the earlier system. Arguably that was largely the case with industrial society replacing feudal and agricultural society. But with the Second and Third Waves -- with industrial and post-industrial society -- it is far from clear that is what is happening. Within any one advanced nation -- the US or UK for example -- only part of society has so far become "post-industrial". Though the manufacturing sector is much reduced, it still exists. This is even more the case in Germany, whose successful economy is still largely industrial. And to the extent that the richest countries are post-industrial, this depends, in large part, on the 'export' of industrial tasks to the developing world -- somebody has to make the iPods and tablet computers. For sure, more and more of the value in advanced economies is in product conception, design, and branding, but products still need to be made somewhere. Also, and oddly easy to overlook, there still exists everywhere a huge government sector, still organized on "industrial" and bureaucratic lines -- the lines that the Third Wave is meant to sweep away -- and showing less imagination and creativity than ever.

Rather than think of waves, we should think of strata or layers. The feudal economy was based on land. Then there developed another tiny layer on top -- originally that of the church and universities. With the emergence of independent city states, and the proliferation of traders, craftsmen, and artisans, another layer was added, eventually paving the way for the Industrial Layer that emerged from 1760 onward. Finally, from the 1950s but especially after 1975, we have seen the emergence of the last Layer, what I call the Age of Mass Imagination, or the Personalized Economy. So now we have at least four layers -- Land, Thinkers, City Merchants, Industry, and Imagination, with new layers perched on top of the earlier ones, benefitting as well as challenging them.

But note that industry, the Second Wave, has grown enormously since Toffler wrote. He said that industrial civilization in 1979 comprises roughly a quarter of the world's population. Today that proportion (including the developed world) is well over half, and the absolute number of people touched by industry has gone up from about a billion to nearer four billion. So it is clear that the Third Wave, far from snuffing out the Second, has helped it extend.

Conclusion

When you think of the transition from a land-based economy everywhere in the world to one that incorporates commerce, industry, and the products of imagination, what is remarkable is how little conflict the transitions have caused. The reason is that, on the whole, the new Layers helped the old. For example, landowners have been enormously enriched by industry and by post-industrial developments, that have raised prosperity and the number of people competing for somewhere nice to live.

But, of course, conflict in the world has not stopped. Conflict arises not primarily because of new economic systems, and the wealth they bring, but because of non-economic considerations -- nationalism, tribalism, racial tension, religion, and ideology. As trade, industry, and imagination increasingly percolate into the nations of the world, we may hope that conflict will abate -- in general, developed countries no longer fight each other. But different patterns of thought and values are not going to be smoothed away by economic progress. This delusion, first promulgated by the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, and then refined by Marx, is still held by many thinkers -- for example, enthusiasts for globalization such as Thomas Friedman. I'm all in favor of the extension of global trade and co-operation, but to expect it to bring universal peace as well as prosperity is to ask too much.

Love in the Time of Social Networking

I recently finished reading a book that claims to explain "what technology does to meeting and mating" - Dan Slater's Love In the Time of Algorithms. The short answer is: it turns people (women and men) into the worst masculine stereotypes of "shopping and fucking"-style cruisers, to borrow from Mark Ravenhill's famous play's title. Maybe this is because all the major sites were founded by, and obsessively managed, sold and bought by, men. There was one female CEO in the biz that I know of: Mandy Ginsberg, of Match in the U.S., who has now moved over to Tutors.com.

What's fascinating and grotesque about Slater's picture of the multi-millions of "users" or "customers" -- webizens all seeking "more connections" with "better people" -- is just how tangled up (others might called it wired up, or linked up) people are in their media streams. They are online daters, many of them, but his point is that mostly, they're just online. A lot. In the America that Slater presents as the place living out the space-time bends in the "time" of algorithms, the following sentence obviously makes sense *on a wide scale*:

"Today's togetherness is often instantaneous, and then constant. You begin dating someone you met online, or off, and in a matter of days you are Facebook friends who also follow each other's Twitter feed and show up on each other's Tumblr dash and chat throughout the day via IM and text. By midday you've opened ten tabs on your browser, and on five of them the avatar of your paramour is blinking and winking and typing and poking and accepting and liking and smiling and frowning and inviting." (Slater 2013, p. 178)

Umm, who are these people? This is a genuine question. What do they think about their MO (modus operandus), their tech-mediated perception of experience, others and sex, their inability to concentrate without a phone in their hand? Do they remember a time when reading meant reading, and watching a movie meant doing just that, sans app, and when working involved working without ten tabs and a million banalities of multi-media banter to distract? Tasks or occupations done without the ticklish whisper of the pulsating "network"? Perhaps not -- perhaps the "time" of algorithms Slater describes is really the time of teenagers, born too late to have experienced offline being, and with too many tools at their disposal in which to channel all the restless dissatisfaction and questing insecurity of the teenage and 20-something years.

Ok, so this is not just a tech-bashing, remember-the-golden-days-pre-web post. At least, not yet. It's an exploratory one, which briefly recounts my impressions of this algorithmic life that seems to define so many people's relationships and quest for love.

Because while reading Slater's well-researched, relentless slurry of web stats, zeitgeisty tech-phrases, business-of-love models and bland company names, I felt that I had missed some major aspect of my contemporaries' experience.

I have given quite a lot of attention to digital life -- aside from my own too-frequent Facebook, email and gratuitous weather forecast checks -- I have written an MPhil thesis on women's experience of online dating, complete with two "research" accounts of my own. I've also downloaded Blendr and in the past, used JDate and Guardian Soulmates for real(ish) short periods.

Each brush with an online dating site, whether for real or for research, felt like a brush with a comb vigorously teasing my hair the wrong way. Nails on a chalkboard. Every last thing about it either repelled me or felt impossible. I cannot, cannot, cannot make myself write the kind of profile that gets the sort of guys people like me want to be in touch. I cannot in good faith genuinely describe myself in more than two lines, utterly suffused with the ridiculousness, the paradoxical nature of trying to describe YOURSELF for a dating site. Would you trust a lonely fridge or washing machine or to describe itself? You would not. You would trust it once you'd read about in Which? or Consumer Reports, or seen it. Or heard about its virtues or faults by either first-hand context or through word of mouth. That point aside -- I mean, clearly people do find text profiles useful (women for men usually) -- I personally could never surmount the embarrassment and clear impossibility of summing myself up in the way you're supposed to sum yourself up for a dating site. You are not supposed to say the same old things -- instead, dazzle with a good joke or anecdote to get people interested. Argh! I can't do it! So instead I say a few terse lines that try to be friendly but are indeed probably a bit superior -- they do not tell funny anecdotes (I don't want the kinds of people who get in touch with me reading personal anecdotes!) The result has always been pitiful, and I mean pitiful, men getting in touch.

Yet everyone else seems to be wading around merrily, riding waves high and low, through the soggy seas of diginetweblove.

So I decided to have another go at a research account (I am not looking to actually meet someone). This time, I went for OkCupid -- some cool people I know, or interviewed for my thesis, did OkCupid and had a nice time. A nice time by the numbers, perhaps; nice dates with nice men who enjoyed scrabble and pub quizzes, or indie concerts and good flat whites on Sundays and so on. None seemed memorable, all fading away into the bulbous glob of people-you-meet-online, or is it the profiles-you-meet-online.

Since logging back on, my phobia and disbelief at how bad online dating sites are (for me!) has soared.

In the first place, the tone of the sites are all reprehensible. Condescending, e.g. "This is fun! But not that many people like you so maybe you could try harder, engage more with our site, help our profit model along!" Also seriously bossy and manipulative: even the inbox page of OkCupid tells me, insultingly, that I could "Join A-list" (or is that a command? Perhaps a threat?). It tells me also to "Complete my profile" and to "Answer 25 match questions." It's also completely incomprehensible, entrenching my suspicion that all those people riding the digital waves know something I don't. For instance: below the menu with "Browse matches," "Messages," "Visitors" and "Quick Match," there is a box headed thus: "You might like: Answer the questions to unlock" followed by a picture of a random hairy student, a box that says Answer 50 and a box that says Answer 75.

OkCupid tells you if you look good in the picture you post. Fuck off, I say. It tells you all the things you can do to attract better people. I did them: I answered several of their questions, though avoided the numerous deeply sex-obsessed ones that in reality won't help match anyone (do you really want to date someone for whom taking it up the butt is a must?). Match and Guardian were even worse, in their own ways. My research account on Match led to daily inundations to the email address I'd set up precisely for this purpose, yelling at me about people who'd winked, checked out my profile, "liked" me, or even -- hello, hello stop the press -- got in touch. All messages concluded with pushy exclamation marks. I reliably felt queasy every time I looked at this inbox.

Here's who has got in touch with me on OkCupid since Thursday.

Awesome catch 1*: "Hi how ru today?" Abdela's profile says: "I am going to get my diploma, I have just not decided where I am going to go or waht I are going to study." And! "I know how to have the best time but I occasionally enjoy staying in!" He is also a devout Muslim. I may not be so appropriate, given "atheist" written firmly in my "beliefs" column.

Awesome catch 2: "Hey:) Ur curls nicer than mine x"

Awesome catch 3: "Hiya, Lovely profile and I must say you look adorable. Get in touch if I appeal to you as well. Cheers, Veer." Veer, "originally from Dubai" looks contemplatively out from under a baseball cap, eyebrows sculpted, in The Thinker pose. "I seem to have ended up single and having no mates around now which I'm clearly not cool enough for but I won't worry about that for now."

Awesome catch 4: "Hey, I'm looking for new friends too"

Awesome catch 5: "Before you click off cause I don't have a pic, it's because I'm having problems uploading them to this site...[goes on for four lines about technical problems]...I have a pic on kik though, so do you have kik so we can talk there, your stunning btw xx i'm 19 btw xx
[note: two days later, still no pic]

Awesome catch 6: "Hey there, sorry for being so direct but I would like nothing more than to take you on a nice date, and then if you are up for it, take you home and go down on you"...

All of the people who have messaged me are "0 % matches".

So much for algorithms.

So much for profiles.

So much for new social horizons.

It's a good thing I'm not on a quest IRL (in real life) for Internet-mediated buddies or partners. A good thing for me. Other people might think otherwise -- and I hope they find what they want, I really do. Because to my eyes, it's a goddamn mess out there.

* Screen names have been changed

Albert Einstein: A Radical Voice Sorely Missed; He'd Be 135 Today

During a visit to California in 1931, physicist Albert Einstein, then living in Europe, asked to meet actor Charlie Chaplin, also an international celebrity and political radical. Chaplin invited him to the premier of the film City Lights. As they posed for photographers, Chaplin commented, "They cheer for me because they all understand me and they cheer for you because nobody understands you."

Einstein (who was born 135 years ago today on March 14, 1879, and died in 1955) was the world's first celebrity scientist. Today, dozens of different posters of Einstein, often adorned with one of his famous quotes, hang on walls in dorm rooms, school classrooms and offices around the world. People who know almost nothing about Einstein's scientific accomplishments (except, perhaps, that he created something called the theory of relativity, or that he is connected with the formula E = mc2) associate his name and image (including the unruly hair and the baggy sweater) with "genius."

Today -- when both science and democracy are under attack by right-wing forces -- Einstein's voice and visibility as both a scientist and citizen are sorely missed.

When TIME selected Einstein as its Person of the Century in its December 31, 1999 issue, it was the fourth time (including 1929, 1946 and 1979) that the scientist had appeared on the magazine's cover.

TIME picked Einstein as its Person of the Century because he, "changed forever the way the rest of us saw the heavens and ourselves." But Einstein also represented science's potential to change the world itself -- to enlist rational thinking and technology to improve the conditions in which we live. Conversely, he also represented science's potential, as in the case of advanced weapons of war, to destroy the world.

Einstein understood this moral and practical dilemma. He did not believe that scientific knowledge, on its own, would save the world. It could be used for good or evil, depending on who had the power to harness science and technology. He thus spent much of his life, in Europe and (after 1933) in the United States, working for peace and social justice. Einstein was a pacifist, a humanist, a socialist and a Zionist. As a scientist, Einstein was a reluctant celebrity, but he recognized that he could use his fame and reputation to promote causes to make the world more humane and democratic. He did so willingly, regularly joining forces with other scientists and activists to challenge the political establishment.

At different times in his life, he was harassed by both the German and the U.S. governments for his political views. During the cold war, the FBI's file on Einstein grew to over 1,800 pages, listing dozens of allegedly "subversive" organizations that he supported. Sen. Joseph McCarthy called Einstein an "enemy of America."

Einstein's passions for science and justice were forged early in his life in Germany. His parents were secular, middle-class Jews. At age five, he was fascinated to learn that invisible forces could move the needle on a compass, sparking a lifelong interest in invisible forces. Seven years later, he read what he called his "sacred little geometry book," which triggered another lifelong passion. At one of his schools, the Prussian-style educational system stifled his original mind and shaped his skepticism toward arbitrary authority. One teacher even told him that he would never amount to anything. Until Einstein was in his mid-20s, it looked as though his teacher might have been correct.

After attending school in Germany and Switzerland, Einstein entered Zurich's Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1896 to become a teacher of physics and mathematics. He earned his diploma in 1901 and became a Swiss citizen, but he was unable to find a teaching job. He eventually got a job as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. On the job and in his spare time, Einstein devoted himself to physics.

Einstein earned his doctorate in 1905. That year, he published several physics papers that solidified his reputation as a pioneering scientist and, we now know, altered the entire field of modern physics. His biggest scientific breakthrough came in 1919. Two expeditions -- one to the Príncipe Island off the west coast of Africa, the other to Sobral in northern Brazil -- were sent to test Einstein's prediction that starlight would be deflected near the sun. A solar eclipse provided evidence supporting his general theory of relativity, which predicted that light would be bent by the sun's gravitational field. In November 1919, the results were announced in London at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. This catapulted Einstein to international fame. The Times of London's headline read, "Revolution in Science - New Theory of the Universe - Newton's Ideas Overthrown - Momentous Pronouncement - Space 'Warped.'" Einstein was invited to lecture around the world, including in the United States in 1921, his first U.S. visit. Wherever he went, huge crowds followed him -- and not just scientists.

In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Einstein's first serious political activities occurred during World War I, when he got involved with several organizations that opposed German militarism and the war. He was one of a handful of intellectuals who signed a manifesto opposing Germany's entry into war. He called nationalism "the measles of mankind."

Einstein found hope in the Gandhian movement in India and its emphasis on civil disobedience. In a speech in New York in September 1930, he challenged fellow pacifists to replace words with deeds. If only 2 percent of those called up for military service refused to fight, he said, governments would be powerless, because they could not send so many people to prison.

As a Jew, a radical and a well-known figure, Einstein was an obvious target for Nazi hatred. The Nazis branded Einstein's science "Jewish physics," organized conferences and book burnings to denounce Einstein and his theories, and disrupted his lectures. Understandably, Einstein feared for his life. He and his wife Elsa were visiting the United States in 1933 after Hitler became German chancellor. Rather than return to Berlin, Einstein took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He renounced his German citizenship and seven years later, became a U.S. citizen. In 1934, he identified the arms industry as, "the hidden evil power behind the nationalism which is rampant everywhere." But that year, seeing the Nazi threat, he also called on the United States and the European nations to prepare for a war against Germany, and he reversed his earlier views about refusing military service. He criticized the U.S. government's neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, which he, like many others, viewed as a battle between fascists and antifascists.

In 1939, more than two years before the United States entered World War II, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about the possibility that Germany might be able to build an atomic bomb. He urged the President to mobilize America's scientific community to conduct the research needed to develop atomic weapons. Roosevelt responded quickly, telling Einstein that he had organized a committee to study the issue. Ironically, when America's best scientists moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1941 for the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb, Einstein -- whose findings had laid the groundwork for the project -- was not invited. Years later, the release of FBI files revealed that Einstein had been blacklisted from the project because of his long involvement with peace and socialist organizations. In 1953, he publicly urged Americans to refuse to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the key organ of the cold war witch hunts.

Einstein would later regret writing his letter to Roosevelt. He was horrified by the human carnage that accompanied the U.S. bombing of Japan in 1945, and he worried about the escalation of the arms race and nuclear weapons during the cold war. In 1954, he told his friend Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life -- when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification -- the danger that the Germans would make them."

Although Einstein retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1945, he continued to speak out on public issues for the rest of his life. In 1946, he became chair of the new Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, formed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, including the hydrogen bomb. Interviewed on Eleanor Roosevelt's television program in 1950, Einstein said, "The idea of achieving security through national armament is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion." In 1955, shortly before his death, Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell persuaded nine other prominent scientists to sign the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the abolition of atomic weapons and of war itself.

In 1948, Einstein supported Henry Wallace's Progressive Party campaign for President; he was part of a coalition of radicals and progressives who admired Wallace's opposition to the cold war, his pro-union views and his support for civil rights. Einstein also often spoke out for the civil rights of African-Americans. He joined a committee to defend the Scottsboro Boys, nine Alabama youths who were falsely accused of rape in 1931 and whose trial became a cause of protest by leftists around the world. He lent his support to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he corresponded with scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1946, he accepted an invitation from the singer and activist Paul Robeson to co-chair the American Crusade to End Lynching, which the FBI considered a subversive organization because its members included radicals trying to pressure President Harry Truman to support a federal law against lynching. That year, almost a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott sparked the modern civil rights movement, Einstein penned an essay, "The Negro Question," in which he called American racism the nation's "worst disease." While effusively praising America's democratic and egalitarian spirit, Einstein noted that Americans' "sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins." Having lived in the United States for little more than a decade, Einstein wrote, "The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me."

Einstein coupled his radical views on politics and race relations with equally radical analyses of economics. In a 1931 article, "The World as I See It," he wrote, "I regard class distinctions as unjustified, and, in the last resort, based on force." In a famous 1949 essay, "Why Socialism?" published in the first issue of the journal Monthly Review, he noted that "the crippling of individuals" is "the worst evil of capitalism." He criticized capitalism's "economic anarchy" and the "oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by democratically organized political society." He believed that a socialist economy had to be linked to a political democracy; otherwise, the rights of individuals would be threatened by an "all-powerful and overweening bureaucracy." It was this radical humanism that led him to oppose Soviet communism.

A victim of anti-Semitism as a young scientist in Germany, Einstein became a vocal advocate for a Jewish state that he hoped would liberate Jews from persecution and encourage the flowering of Jewish culture. Einstein was a secular Jew, and a socialist, and he hoped that Israel would be both. He believed in the importance of having a Jewish homeland, but also hoped that Jews and Arabs would be able to share power and coexist in one county. Once Israel was created in 1948, he became a strong supporter of the nation, which was founded on socialist principles, but he was disappointed that it did not become a joint Jewish-Arab nation. In 1952, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the presidency of Israel, a ceremonial position. Einstein was flattered, but declined. However, he continued to raise funds and promote the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he had helped establish and which became a world-renowned institution.

From early adulthood until he died, the rational scientist was also a passionate citizen of the world. A year before his death, Einstein explained that he wrote and spoke out on public issues "whenever they appeared to me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have made me feel guilty of complicity."

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For further reading:

Albert Einstein, The World as I See It. New York: Citadel Press, 1991. Originally published 1935.

Albert Einstein. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Modern Library, 1994. Originally published 1954.

Albert Einstein and Jim Green. Albert Einstein: Rebel Lives. New York: Ocean Press, 2003.

Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.

Fred Jerome. The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.

Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor. Einstein on Race and Racism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

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Peter Dreier teaches Politics and chairs the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012). Albert Einstein is one of the people profiled in that book.