Can we move past pure outrage?

Eric Meyer's Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty got a lot of traction over the past week. He discusses how Facebook's Year in Review app confronted him with a photo of his daughter who died this year.

Yes, my year looked like that.  True enough.  My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl.  It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong.  Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.  These are hard, hard problems.  It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a follow-up titled Unexamined Privilege Is The Real Source of Cruelty in Facebook's “Year In Review”.

UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”—a feature conceived and designed by a group to whom nothing terrible has happened yet. A brilliant upper-middle-class student at an elite university conceived Facebook, and college students, as everyone knows, were its founding user group. The company hires recent graduates of expensive and exclusive design programs and pays them several times the going rate to brainstorm and execute exciting new features. 

...

But when you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows—not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.

At least in my Twitter timeline, I saw plenty of people jump on Zeldman's post to excoriate Facebook engineers for being privileged and heartless. Were there other posts like Zeldman's? 

I was really happy to see Meyer do a follow-up where he urged folks to put away the pitchforks and cage the outrage monster the internet loves to summon.

Yes, their design failed to handle situations like mine, but in that, they’re hardly alone.  This happens all the time, all over the web, in every imaginable context.  Taking worst-case scenarios into account is something that web design does poorly, and usually not at all.  I was using Facebook’s Year in Review as one example, a timely and relevant foundation to talk about a much wider issue.

...

What surprised and dismayed me were the…let’s call them uncharitable assumptions made about the people who worked on Year in Review.  “What do you expect from a bunch of privileged early-20s hipster Silicon Valley brogrammers who’ve never known pain or even want?” seemed to be the general tenor of those responses.

No.  Just no.  This is not something you can blame on Those Meddling Kids and Their Mangy Stock Options.

First off, by what right do we assume that young programmers have never known hurt, fear, or pain?  How many of them grew up abused, at home or school or church or all three?  How many of them suffered through death, divorce, heartbreak, betrayal?  Do you know what they’ve been through?  No, you do not.  So maybe dial back your condescension toward their lived experiences.

Second, failure to consider worst-case scenarios is not a special disease of young, inexperienced programmers.  It is everywhere.

A voice of sanity online? Elsa is working her magic in Hell.

I don't mean to imply there isn't privilege of all forms, or that more diversity isn't a good thing. I believe strongly in both. But if there's one thing that exhausted me about the online community in 2014 it was the never-ending cycle of outrage. And if there's one thing I wish we'd see more of in 2015 it's more reasoned, nuanced debate.

That begins with not misreading Zeldman's post, either. The paragraph that came between the two I quoted above was this:

I’m not saying that these brilliant young designers are heartless, or that individuals among them haven’t personally experienced tragedy—that would be mathematically impossible. I have taught some of these designers, and worked with others. Those I’ve known are wonderful people who want to make a difference in the world. And in theory (and sometimes in practice) a platform like Facebook lets them do that.

Both of Meyer's pieces are worth reading in their entirety, as is Zeldman's piece, whose title and opening paragraph are far more extreme than the rest of the piece.

It feels good to create the “other.” Humans love the ingroup-outgroup dynamics. It's so psychologically comforting to belong to one side and channel one's rage to demonize a common enemy. I'm not asking for artificial harmony but a shift towards more rational, unemotional debate.

How? I'm not sure, but the next time you feel the urge to unleash the rage monster, step back from the keyboard and try to pass Bryan Caplan's ideological Turing test. It's not perfect, but I don't have any better ideas. It takes two to have a reasoned debate. You count as one. Empathy creates the other.

Echoes of the fall of the studio system in journalism

Most people today think of movie studios as largely interchangeable. Who cares if the opening credits of a movie bring up the Warner Bros or Paramount or Twentieth Century Fox title card? It's a meaningless signal as to what you're going to see next. And what does it even mean, to show their logo before the movie? Ask most moviegoers and the best they can offer is that perhaps the studio put up the money (which isn't far from the truth), but most won't really have any idea.

It wasn't always this way. In the heyday of the studio system, the late 1920's through the early 1960's, if Twentieth Century Fox or MGM came up before a movie, it told you a lot about the theme, subject, tone, and style of the movie to follow. Since talent (directors, screenwriters, actors, etc.) worked for studios back then, you could often anticipate who would star in the movie, what genre it would be about, who might direct and shoot the movie, if I simply told you which studio was behind a movie. What's more, studios owned the theater chains themselves so they could guarantee distribution of their films.

As if it wasn't enough to control not just the means of production (talent) and distribution, studios faced little competition at the time from foreign movies or other forms of entertainment. The vast power they wielded wasn't all bad; the studios put out some amazing movies. They also produced a lot of dreck.

When I read about the problems facing professional journalism today, I hear echoes of the changes that led to the fall of the studio system. In 1948, in United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that the major U.S. movie studios had to sell off their ownership in movie theater chains. This was a boon to other studios and independent artists who didn't own their own theaters. No longer were the major studios the gatekeepers to what could get shown.

The internet, of course, had the same effect on distribution of content in journalism. No longer do major metro newspapers own de facto monopolies on what people can consume as part of their journalistic diet. In the 1960's, foreign cinema finally made inroads in the U.S. and grabbed mindshare, covering topics and themes that American studios shied away from either by choice or because of reflexive adherence to The Hays Code, which had already been outlawed in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952.

[By the way, if you've never read The Hays Code, it's worth scanning. Strands of its rigid morality still weave themselves through much of Hollywood's output today.]

Just as major studios allowed foreign movies and independent studios to take the lead on diversity in subject matter, blogs and new media sites have arisen to cover all sorts of subjects that newspapers have either never had the bandwidth or desire to cover. For any odd subject matter, I just assume there's a subreddit for it.

It's not just subject matter but form and style where old media is chasing the new. It wasn't the major newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post who leapt first into publishing blogs and listicles online as regular features. Long before old media started having their reporters on Twitter and other social media, independent bloggers were ensuring their voices could be heard on all networks online. This is hard to remember now because most of the old guard have made the leap by  now, but I remember when you couldn't find the vast majority of old media journalists on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere else.

Another common lament of journalists today is the rise in competition for mindshare. People have too many options on their phone competing with the news, and more often than not, this generation chooses Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et al over the news.

The studios faced just as significant a competitor in the rise of television, which started to gain traction in the 1950's and 1960's (when color television was invented and went mainstream). Suddenly, people had a much broader choice of entertainment form factor. No longer was the 90 to 120 minute narrative film the primary video form factor.

It's not just about the overall package or the choice of newspaper but what's inside it that has been pushed into a bigger pool of competition. When I was in elementary school, my only source of much information (movie listings, comic strips, automobile reviews, stock prices) came from the Chicago Tribune. Today, specialty websites have given newspapers massive competition along every subject vertical. During WWII, many Americans got news of American troops in newsreels played before movies. Monopolies make for strange bedfellows. After television rose to prominence, newsreels and the video news function in general moved to television.

Today, I don't get movie showtimes, restaurant reviews, or stock quotes from my local newspaper. In fact, I get almost nothing from local newspapers. I'm still a big Chicago sports fan, and for many years, though I was living in other cities, I still turned to the Chicago Tribune for local sports coverage. Then the website was overrun with ads of all types and then a metered paywall and finally it became near unusable. It turns out their local coverage wasn't all that unique anyhow. Now I rely on niche blogs like Bleacher Nation to keep up with my Cubs.

The package of content in a newspaper was always somewhat arbitrary and non-personalized. What if you didn't like automobiles or business news or reviews of obscure history tomes? Too bad, you were paying for it as part of your daily newspaper (many of the subject choices in the bundle were advertising-driven, of course, as grim world and local news is not a desirable subject matter for advertisers).

This is both good—users can pick and choose their media diet!—and bad—users can pick and choose their media diet! It turns out that when people can choose what to read each day rather than have it assigned to them as one lump, they tend to lean away from a steady diet of grim world news. In fact, they want “serious news” in a much much lower proportion of their diet than traditional newspaper dole it out. Any parent knows if they let their kids choose what to eat, they'll over-index on sugar, under-index on vegetables. Buzzfeed does some really great long-form journalism, but compare their front page to that of The New York Times and you'll find a substantial difference in subject matter weighting.

Movie studios are facing a similar economic conundrum on this front. The movie studio equivalent of “serious news” is the mid-tier adult drama, many of which appeal to an increasingly narrow population of cinephiles. These types of movies tend not to travel well internationally so they can't capitalize on foreign box office revenue to help recoup their budgets. They're too expensive to make relative to their revenue; soon we may see directors of such serious fare starring in short infomercials, urging donations to protect what is in essence an endangered species.

This is exactly the brutal reality of lots of the types of serious long-term global reporting that institutions like The New York Times have long championed. I'm a huge fan of many mid-tier adult dramas, and I believe in the importance of the types of long-term reporting to society, but I'm also a fan of the free market, and both have benefitted from cross-subsidization and de-facto monopolies that have fallen away. Lamentation is not a business strategy.

You know what does travel well internationally? Superhero movies. You know what types of articles travel well through today's social networks, attracting viewers by tapping into some primal wiring in our brain? Clickbait, like listicles and photo galleries of celebrities coming out of clubs and restaurants and gyms. I'm painting with broad sweeps of my arms, but only because the broad trends are unmistakeable.

Another similarity between the fall of the studio system and the changes sweeping across journalism is the rise in power of the talent. Recall that studios once locked up talent to multi-movie, multi-year contracts. Imagine if Tom Cruise could only make movies for Warner Bros, only for their directors, only in movies by their screenwriters. That was once how Hollywood worked, and often the star didn't even have a choice of whether to take a role; it was assigned to them.

In time, some movie stars sued to get out of their onerous contracts, and today we accept that most movie talent are free agents that can pick and choose their projects. Sure, some studios still offer offices and money to producers for first look deals, but most significant talent aren't locked up. Journalism has seen the rise of power for journalists with their own following as well, with Bill Simmons and Grantland being the most prominent example (it's under the auspices of ESPN, but occasionally he gets banned from Twitter for a few days, but that doesn't detract from his stunning rise in power from the blogger Sports Guy for AOL to Bill Simmons; it's no coincidence more people refer to him by his real name now than his Sports Guy moniker).

Not every talent has the brand to pursue this strategy, but the economics for such stars are almost always better if they test themselves in free agency. Here's another though experiment: imagine I tell you you're going to see a Sony Pictures movie. Or read an ESPN article. What comes to mind? Anything distinctive or specific?

Now imagine I tell you you're going to see a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Or read a Bill Simmons article. What you anticipate is likely far more specific and vivid. Some movie studios have that distinctiveness, Pixar is always held up as the poster child for a studio whose brand still has weight as an artistic signal, but examples like that or The New Yorker, media enterprises with a distinctive house style, are the exception. It's no surprise. The role an ESPN assumes in supporting Grantland or that Dreamworks occupies with a Steven Spielberg movie is more financial than anything else.

It's not just previously established stars who have been empowered. Anyone with an internet connection can publish and distribute now, adding even more competition for old media. The cost of writing is much lower, of course, than to make a movie, but in short form video entertainment in particular, with YouTube or Vine, the need for studio support for talent has lessened.

Great movies were produced in both the heyday of the studio system and today, just as great journalism was done in the age of the local newspaper monopoly and today. I'm neither overly nostalgic for the past nor universally enthusiastic about all modern progress, and I don't get caught up in debates about the merits of the past versus the future. However, from a business perspective, nostalgia is a dangerous emotion. There are at least two ways to rage against the dying of the light, and only one of them is productive.

Ayn Rand reviews children's movies

Via Kottke, some reviews of children's movies by Mallory Ortberg, channeling Ayn Rand.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. —No stars.

...

“Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”

An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. —Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)

The GoPro life, broadened

First watch the GoPro Hero3 promo video, released in October 2012:

Shot 100% on the new HERO3® camera from http://GoPro.com. Capture and share your life's most meaningful experiences with the HERO3+ Black Edition. 20% smaller and lighter than its best-selling predecessor, it delivers improved image quality and powerful new features geared for versatility and convenience.

Then watch the GoPro Hero4 Black promo video, released in September 2014:

All around the world GoPro users are capturing incredible experiences, from the heart-stopping to the heartfelt. Into the caldron of an active volcano, the neon streets of Japan, a refuge for wild mustangs, scaling an iceberg, the world's biggest dance party, or a whale rescue mission, GoPros have documented every moment.

Do you notice a difference?

I do, and it's not about video quality. It's subtle, but the earlier GoPro promo is made up almost entirely of footage of people participating in extreme sport or recreational activities. While the whole promo is a hell of an adrenaline rush, it clearly positions GoPro as being a camera for the adrenaline junkies who are wired differently than most.

The latter video maintains GoPro's brand leadership as the camera of choice for people in the most exciting moments of their lives, but it is more inclusive. There is footage of kids dancing at EDM festivals, a cowboy riding a horse, stars blinking to life in a time lapse of a night sky, and people whale watching. Granted, there's still a dose of the more extreme stuff—some Japanese driving Lamborghinis through a city at night, two guys climbing an iceberg that threatens to crumble and dump them in the middle of the ocean—but that material makes up just a portion of the footage.

This is a brand trying to appeal to a broader base of consumers. It makes sense. The size of the market for people who ski off of cliffs and do somersaults in the air is limited. It's still a $400 or more camera, so it's not as if GoPro is including video of people lying on a sofa binge-watching Scandal, but I'd expect the shift to continue the next time they update their product line and release a promo video. I wouldn't be surprised if that promo includes footage of a young child cannonballing into a pool while filming himself with a GoPro attached to a selfie stick, or footage from the family dog's point of view as she chases down a frisbee on a sandy beach, or even drone footage of an outdoor wedding.

Perhaps we may even start to see a celebrity or two make a cameo appearance, to give the GoPro a wider type of lifestyle appeal, not just one centered around activities for people not afraid to die. I also suspect they've pushed up against a ceiling on price (the Hero4 Silver runs $400, the Hero4 Black $500, and that's just the starting point before piling on costs of accessories like mounts and additional batteries). GoPro will likely want to start pressing down what is for now a generous price umbrella for competitors must salivate when they see GoPro's $7B+ market cap.