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Upgrade or Die
Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned and virtually perfected… But in other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. Here, George Packer argues that obsessive technological upgrading and the country’s chronic stagnation are intimately related, “in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression. The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world…”
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Znc6Rx
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Idea of the Week: Open vs. Closed→
On The Business Pages this week, Tim Wu has a story about the open-versus-closed debate in the technology industry. Here’s a look at the metric Wu developed for assessing the “openness” of companies, and see whether Wu’s theory proves true when applied to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft: http://nyr.kr/W7Pv9G
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And yet, the dominant sensation in seeing the spidery new detail on the land is that it reminds us just how much we still can not see. For now, it’s hard to envision how the map will have much impact inside North Korea, because almost nobody there has access to the Web. The delight we get in a digital glimpse of the North Koreans’ land only underscores the span between their reality and ours. The map allows us to indulge our curiosity, but we are just as in the dark as ever about the mysterious realm inside the heads of Kim Jong Un and his mercurial men. Politically, North Korea remains as black as a satellite map at night.
Evan Osnos looks beyond the new Google Map of North Korea: http://nyr.kr/14qwchk
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"Rather than formally recognizing Google’s enormous market power in search, and putting the company on notice that its actions will be closely scrutinized going forward, the F.T.C. dismissed the most important complaints about its behavior as the whining of competitors."
— John Cassidy explains why the Feds should have been tougher on Google “for indulging in some anti-competitive practices, and… biasing its search results to hurt competitors”: http://nyr.kr/UKIjoD(Source: newyorker.com)
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End of the World Means Most Amazing Home Page Ever, says Google→
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Cal. (The Borowitz Report)—While billions around the world await the Mayan Apocalypse this Friday with increasing dread, there is palpable excitement about it at the headquarters of Google, Inc., which is preparing what its C.E.O. is calling “our most awesome Google Doodle ever.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/T6kTXP
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"What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality."
— Gary Marcus on Google’s driver-less car, and building machines with the ability to make ethical decisions: http://nyr.kr/R8J1ua -
Who Can Read Your Gmail?→
The F.B.I.’s request to access the private Gmail account maintained by General Petraeus would have been only one of 34,614 such requests Google received from governments as well as civil litigants around the world between January and June, 2012.
John Seabrook talks to Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, about how these requests are handled, and how the Electronic Communications Privacy Act affected the Petraeus scandal: http://nyr.kr/W7O4aH
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Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?→
When I was embedded at Google for a good part of more than two years reporting a book, I sat in quite a few meetings conducted by Marissa Mayer, the prominent executive who’s just announced that she’s leaving to become the C.E.O. of Yahoo. I was struck that she possessed a quality that’s been in short supply at Yahoo in recent years: clarity.
Ken Auletta on Marissa Mayer’s move to Yahoo, and why Silicon Valley still needs more female C.E.O.s: http://nyr.kr/MBA44T
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There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. In this week’s issue Ken Auletta asks, should there be? http://nyr.kr/HWXpQw
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(Source: newyorker.com)
