The Porthole by Martin Kastner
The first time I went to Aviary in Chicago, we were served a cocktail in this beautiful vessel. Now it has a name, The Porthole, and it can be yours for a contribution to its Kickstarter project.
Martin Kastner of Crucial Detail designed The Porthole as well as a lot of the serving ware at Alinea which, like Aviary and Next Restaurant, are part of the Grant Achatz's elite Chicago dining portfolio. You can purchase some of that serving ware from Crucial Detail's web shop.
Or, as Tim Parks asks in the New York Review of Books, does copyright matter? A good overview of the history of copyright, and some of its implications. Of particular interest is speculation on what would happen if copyright didn't exist.
One sees here the difference from the music industry: unable to police their copyright on CDs, musicians nevertheless go on writing songs and can enjoy the feedback and hopefully some income from performing them to an appreciative public; if the songs happen to catch on through the internet then the musicians can enjoy notoriety and expect bigger concerts, if not a huge income from selling albums. But there is no such performative context for the prose thriller, or even the great American novel. Without the prospect of money, the author would have to think very hard what it is he really wants to write and how he plans to engage with an eventual community of readers whose appreciation, if not cash, must suffice to give him the gratification and encouragement he seeks. In short, you wouldn’t launch blindly into a major novel, as so many young writers do, simply because novels are the form that command attention and promise an income.
There is no real performative context for television and movies, either. Leave aside the heated and emotional debate about piracy and how we should value the arts. Parks concludes that copyright exists because we enjoy long-form fiction, and so copyright continues to be pushed down the road to shelter that art form.
Copyright, we see, is not essentially driven by notions of justice or theories of ownership, but by a certain culture’s attachment to a certain literary form. If people only read poetry, which you can never stop poets producing even when you pay them nothing at all, then the law of copyright would disappear in a trice.
So by continuing to buy novels, we continue to extend the life of copyright. How does that loop work, exactly?
Does the same mechanism fuel the continued existence of the broken patent system in technology? Are we, as consumers of lots of patented technologies, complicit? Is our spending funding, indirectly, a powerful lobby? That may be an unintended side effect of our economic and political systems, that the collective well being of society as a whole is undermined by the concentrated will of special interests who, perversely, are funded by the purchase choices of the same people who will be hurt the most. Patent law could just be a glitch in the tech industry's economic matrix.
A fun marketing idea from Honest Tea: they set up unmanned kiosks in 30 cities and asked people to pay $1 per bottle of Honest Tea on the honor system. They published the rankings online.
The top three places were Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Boulder, with the first two scoring 100% (I have no idea of the sample size) and Boulder with 99%. The bottom 3 out of 75 places were S. Chicago fans at 82% (what are S. Chicago fans?), Los Angeles (79%), and Brooklyn in last place with a distant 61%.
[Very minor spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen last night's episode of The Newsroom]
Sorkin repeats himself. The supercut hammered that point home. In itself, not a deal breaker. Strong voices tend to have recognizable tics, especially verbal ones, and some strong sense of authorship brings us back.
But last night's episode of The Newsroom lifted an entire dramatic scenario in a way that felt like a glitch in the Matrix.
Mackenzie asks Jim if he knows the poem that begins "gather ye rosebuds, while ye may" as a gentle nudge that he should admit to Maggie that he has a big crush on her.
In The West Wing episode "20 Hours in L.A.", Donna says to Josh:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Josh. Do you know what that means? It means you should take this time to gather rosebuds, because later on you might not be able to.
She says it to push Josh to make a move on Joey Lucas (Marlee Matlin).
In The Newsroom, Jim finally summons the courage to tell Maggie how he feels. He rushes over to her apartment, ready to deliver his "You complete me" speech (or perhaps to tell Maggie that he intercepted flowers that some other woman sent Don at work). The door opens, and he sees Maggie with her current boyfriend Don. He switches gears midstream and is whisked away by Maggie's roommate Lisa, who mistakenly thinks he's there in a continued effort to woo her.
In "20 Hours in L.A." (here's an old recap from Television Without Pity so you can play along at home), Josh takes Donna's counsel to heart and rushes up to Joey's hotel room. The door opens, and it's Lisa from The Newsroom. No, I jest, it's Joey's boyfriend, Al Kiefer. Like Don, Al has a character flaw, he's a pollster who we've seen urge President Bartlet to support an amendment to ban flag burning (wherever you stand on said issue, what matters here is that in Sorkin's moral calculus, such an amendment would be a travesty).
Al is in a bathrobe, and Joey pops out of the bathroom in a bathrobe also. Like Jim, Josh quickly improvises an excuse for why he came by, then wanders off.
This is just one example. Fellow Sorkinites, feel free to submit your own in the comments. Thanks to my fellow West Wing junkie Ken for helping me spot these every week to torture myself with them. Could someone write a program to cross reference each week's script from The Newsroom with the West Wing Transcripts and just save us the trouble? Or instead of just a soundboard, could someone build an Aaron Sorkin dramatic beat board? It would contain a grab bag of scenes you could transpose to a variety of show concepts and settings (the White House, cable news show, Sportscenter-like show, Saturday-Night-LIve-like show, etc.).
Sometimes you want to listen to pop music, sometimes you want to listen to jazz. Pop music is low entropy: you know what's coming, and the music delivers. That's gratifying and comforting in some deep human way. But sometimes you want jazz, which is high entropy. Who knows where Miles Davis is taking this riff, and when it will end.
The Newsroom is low entropy Sorkin, and it drives me batty week after week. Even the news stories in the show are a year old. If you haven't seen enough Sorkin to recognize the recycling, the show may be high entropy for you. Its weekly dosage of self-righteous indignation (it reminds me of my Twitter feed many weeks), the absurd coincidences that fuel ACN's lucky breaks ("Wait, my college roommate's girlfriend's cousin was Osama Bin Laden's pilates instructor." "Why didn't you say something earlier?!"), the scripts that make the lovable Emily Mortimer into a screeching wreck (this past episode was a new low for Mackenzie) and Sam Waterson into a drunken...no wait, I'm not complaining about Waterson, his alcoholic Charlie Skinner is an asset, he seems to have just wandered in to the Newsroom set from another, much funnier show.
Thankfully for Sorkin, this is just television, not the ideas circuit. Before Jonah Lehrer was caught for making up Bob Dylan quotes, he was caught recycling himself, and he had to issue a public apology. I don't think Sorkin will be apologizing anytime soon.
And yet, as you can tell, I've watched up through the penultimate episode of this season, and I won't lie, I will watch the season finale when I probably should be out gathering me rosebuds. What draws me back every week to this ritual of televisual self-flagellation? It's not hate-watching, I couldn't do that for more than an episode or two, for any show.
It's the cadence of the dialogue, the ping-pong patter of so many characters speaking Sorkinese vivacissimamente. Sorkin's written voice is more recognizable for me than anyone's in TV and film except perhaps Mamet's, and the pace is old school movie fast, just a hair's breath behind His Girl Friday. It's invigorating. Sorkin's tempo seems suited to the needs of my modern brain, which is constantly seeking more more more input (excuse me while I pull to refresh...beep...5 new tweets!). When I watch most television shows, I'm on my iPhone every few minutes, but with The Newsroom, when I check my phone I tend to rewind and listen to the dialogue I missed. There's no breathing room, and being breathless is its own rush (I imagine it must be as fun for actors, like a verbal spin class).
If only that firehose of language delivered more intellectual calories. If the characters from The Newsroom were as smart as Sorkin wants us to believe they are, they'd find themselves as silly as I do.
"When the Network Effect Goes Into Reverse" is the title of a James Stewart article from last Friday in the NYTimes. It caught my attention because I'd never heard of a network effect reversing. At first blush, I wasn't even sure what that meant.
I'm not certain if there's a canonical definition of network effects, but the one I've always worked from is from Hal Varian's Information Rules (if you work in the internet space and haven't read this classic, pick it up posthaste) which seemed like a generalization of the law named after Bob Metcalfe, which was specific to telecommunications networks.
Metcalfe's Law, per Wikipedia (which gives discovery credit to George Gilder):
The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.
Hal Varian on network effects, from page 13 of Information Rules:
When the value of a product to one user depends on how many other users there are, economists say that this product exhibits network externalities, or network effects.
If you read Stewart's article, he seems to reach for a literal reading. That is, if you start losing users, the value of the product or service also declines. Stewart quotes internet analyst Ken Sena:
“The network effect allowed these companies to grow so fast, but the decline can be just as ferocious,” Mr. Sena said. “If any of them misstep with users, they can leave, and the network effect goes into reverse.”
There's the germ of an interesting idea in Sena's quote, but the rest of Stewart's article doesn't tease it out. Instead, the examples Stewart goes on to cite fail to support his headline, and many are just plain false. He writes::
Facebook has been a classic example. If your friends, colleagues or classmates are all on it, you’re all but compelled to join. But evidence that the network effect is working requires rapid growth in users and revenue, especially during the early stages of a company’s public life. So far, social media has failed to deliver the kind of growth that would bolster investor optimism, let alone euphoria.
How is Facebook not one of the most canonical examples of the power of the network effect? Stewart's point seems to be that since Facebook's user growth has slowed since they went public, the network effect is failing? Facebook has over 900 million users! Despite the law of large numbers, it's still growing.
To me, the only growth problem that Stewart says social media needs to deliver to "bolster investor optimism" is monetization. In terms of user growth, I'd be hard pressed to think of many faster growing companies in history than recent social media examples like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Then Stewart shifts to Groupon:
This week’s Groupon earnings illustrated the problem for social media companies. In theory, Groupon should benefit from the network effect. The more users it attracts, the more merchants will want to offer coupons through Groupon, and vice versa. And on the face of it, the earnings report looked good. Groupon earned a profit of $28.4 million for the quarter, above analysts’ expectations, reversing a loss a year ago. Groupon’s boyish-looking chief executive, Andrew Mason, called it a “solid quarter.”
But growth, not profit, is what matters at the early stage in the life of a networked Internet company. Groupon said revenue grew 45 percent over the same quarter last year. But it counts payments that it passes on to merchants as part of its revenue. When that part of revenue was excluded, revenue grew just 30 percent. And compared with the previous quarter, revenue grew just 1.6 percent.
First of all, Groupon is not really a network effect company. Remember Varian's or Metcalfe's definitions above. The direct value of Groupon to me hasn't changed appreciably even though its user base has grown. Any company with a lot of users will be attractive to advertisers or merchants, not just Groupon. That is unrelated to network effects. I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between Groupon when it had many fewer users and today, when it has many more users. [1] But from the early days of Facebook and Twitter to where they are today, the value of the service to me has shifted dramatically from its now massive user bases. Those are network effect companies.
Later Stewart writes that "a positive network effect is supposed to exclude competitors, but Groupon has long suffered from the perception that it's vulnerable to competition." He actually answers his own question, because Groupon is not a network effects company, and thus it doesn't benefit from the competitive protection such a model would offer.
Secondly, Stewart conveniently looks at only the last two quarters of Groupon's results and refers to those as "early stage". In its actual "early stages", Groupon was, by many accounts, the fastest growing company in history, reaching massive revenue milestones in times that I don't think would have been possible prior to the invention of the internet. Stewart's implication that Groupon didn't have enough growth at its early stages is just wrong. Groupon does have issues, but a reversal of network effects is not it.
So if this article doesn't support the concept of reversed network effects, then what does? If we go back to Varian's definition, there is another way to interpret "network effects in reverse," and that is by reversing the value of every additional user. That is, "network effects in reverse" could mean that a the value of a product or service decreases with each successive user. In fact, whether we call it "network effects in reverse" or something else, perhaps "network defects," there are many examples of companies that reach a state where such a phenomenon occurs, and I believe it can explain why some internet companies can spiral into rapid decline in such a sudden fashion.
It's a topic that interests me quite a bit, so I'll cover in in another post.
1 Groupon had one very light network effect built into its product early on in that certain deals wouldn't convert unless enough people purchased it. So having more users on the network could affect the rate at which deals I purchased became valid. But for a long time now, it seems as if essentially every GroupOn deal converts. I'm not a heavy user so my recollection of this is fuzzy.