Understanding Steve

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This morning’s Observer column.

Watching Jobs in action, I've always had the feeling that there's something eerily familiar about him. But it wasn't until I read a new book, The Master Switch, by Columbia law professor Tim Wu, that the penny dropped. The book chronicles the history of the major communications industries of the 20th century and finds that pivotal moments in their evolution came when an entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers higher quality, production values and/or greater ease of use than were being delivered by the incumbents…

In a nutshell

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Today’s Financial Times finally gets round to an obituary of Daniel Bell and quotes his description of himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”. Reading it, I was struck by the realisation that it’s probably also a good description of me. Sigh.

Waiting for Fuji

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Every photographer I know seems to be waiting for the Fuji x100 to be launched (it’s due in March, apparently). Not sure why people are so excited about it, but here are some guesses: the viewfinder technology is interesting — combining Leica-type brightline optical viewfinder with a superimposable digital read-out; and Fuji make pretty good lenses. It has a prime non-interchangeable 23mm lens which, when corrected for the sensor size, works out at 35mm effective focal length. And it will cost $1,000 in the US — which, needless to say, UK dealers will translate as £1,000.

Now comes the surprising bit. yesterday Fuji released a gallery of sample images taken with the new camera. And, guess what? They’re utterly banal.

iCapitalism

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Well, well. Nasty ol’ Steve Jobs rejected this iPhone App. Here’s what the FAQs say.

How do I play?

Click on the Play tab. Then click Increase Your Level. You will be presented with a list of level upgrades you can purchase with real money.

So there’s really no skill involved?

None at all! The person who pays us the most wins. The rest are displayed on a leaderboard in descending order.

Does my money get me anything besides a higher spot on the leaderboard?

When you increase your level you can enter a custom message. All other players can see this when you’re on leaderboard. The top payer player becomes the “Head Honcho,” and their (inevitably more important) message will be the first thing everyone sees when they boot the app.

WikiLeaks and the cowardice of American journalism

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I know the British press is nothing to write home about, but I’ve never understood why American journalists take themselves so seriously. They, after all, are the ‘professionals’ who missed Enron, the banking catastrophe and the Bush Administration’s ludicrous case for going to war in Iraq. Until recently, they were also the ‘professionals’ who were so impaled on the horns of the ‘balance as bias’ dilemma that many of them missed the global warming issue. So I’ve been cheering this fiery piece by Naomi Wolf about the slippery way US journalists have been willing to hang Julian Assange out to dry.

Here is what readers are not being told: We have ALL handled classified information if we are serious American journalists. I am waiting for more than a handful of other American reporters, editors and news organizations to have the courage — courage that is in abundance in Tahrir Square and on the pages of Al Jazeera, now that we no longer see it on the editorial page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal — to stand up and confirm the obvious. For the assault on Assange to be credible, they would have to come arrest us all. Many of Bob Woodward's bestselling books, which have made him America's highest-paid reporter, are based on classified information — that's why he gets the big bucks. Where are the calls for Woodward's arrest? Indeed Dick Cheney and other highest-level officials in the Bush administration committed the same act as Bradley Manning in this case, when they illegally revealed the classified identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

So why do all these American reporters, who know quite well that they get praise and money for doing what Assange has done, stand in a silence that can only be called cowardly, while a fellow publisher faces threats of extradition, banning, prosecution for spying — which can incur the death penalty — and calls for his assassination?

One could say that the reason for the silence has to do with the sexual misconduct charges in Sweden. But any serious journalist in America knows perfectly well that the two issues must not be conflated. The First Amendment applies to rogues and scoundrels. You don't lose your First Amendment rights because of a sleazy personality, or even for having committed a crime. Felons in jail are protected by the First Amendment. Indeed the most famous First Amendment cases, the ones that are supposed to showcase America's strength and moral power, involve the protection of speech most decent people hate…

Bad language?

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Google has converted its wonderful web-based Google Translate into a native iOS app for iPhone, with voice input for 15 languages and support for speaking results in 23 languages.

So I downloaded and installed it on my phone. It invited me to speak, so I requested a translation of the following sentence: “I am wondering what you think of President Sarkozy”.

The phone thought for a moment, and then replied: Je me demandez ce que vous pensez de sucer president ####”.

Hmmm…

Bakunin with a MacBook

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Nice Prospect Magazine essay by Michael Weiss, who sees a striking similarity between Julian Assange and the 19th-century anarchist and failed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin.

Born in 1814 and justifiably forgotten today for his lack of theoretical rigor or coherent platform, Bakunin, like Assange, fancied himself a principled anarchist. But it was his personal characteristics that came to define his reputation. To friend and foe alike, he was a chancer, a sponger and a delusional madcap. Bakunin said he wanted to release the “evil passions” of mankind through revolution. Out of a similarly blinding hubris, Assange deflects his colleagues’ criticism by saying, “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end.”

Both men gloried in the secret society and coded message rather than above-ground operations. Like Assange, Bakunin flitted through Europe with police tails, disguises and an air of conspiracy. He commanded a cult-like following of friends. Edmund Wilson wrote of Bakunin that “he was able to catch people up by the spell of a personality part of whose power resided in the fact that it had the ingenuousness of a child… his conspiracies were always partly imaginary, and he never himself seems quite to have known the difference between actuality and the dream.” Assange is fond of skipping down city streets while journalists are discussing his materials. According to the New York Times, he believes that Stasi agents still control the German secret police archives, which they’re deleting from history.

AOL goes Huffing and Puffing

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AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post has got everyone excited. Except me and the inimitable Om Malik. He reports that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants AOL home page to be the start page for information. But, says Malik, it ain’t going to happen. The world of today doesn’t work that way. People have their favorites and start their news day at random places.

AOL’s moves are much like the ending scene from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Surrounded by the Bolivian Army, Dos Hombres have no choice to make a gallant dash to their horses, guns blazing, hoping against hope as thousand guns blaze around them. The ever-increasing web inventory is like the Bolivian Army firing on AOL and others who have not yet come to terms with the futility of chasing page views.

Despite what you might read in the newspapers and blogs, AOL is still in A-O-Hell. In the most recent quarter, the company saw its advertising revenues go down 29 percent, at a time when online advertising grew about 14 percent. According to eMarketer, its share of total online display advertising was down to 5.3 percent in 2010 from 6.8 percent in 2009.

It’s funny how stuff gets laid down in corporate DNA and is then impossible to shift. AOL started out as the ultimate ‘walled garden’: it thought it would be able to keep its subscribers corralled inside rather than venturing out onto the Wild West Web. The fantasy about becoming the start page for today’s Web is a reflection of the same mindset.

Wallflowers at the Revolution

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Nice rant by Frank Rich in the NYT.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

En passant: it’s been interesting to hear the frustration of intelligent US citizens about the non-availability of Al Jazeera on American cable channels and networks. It’s the old story: “600 channels and nothing on TV”.