Category: Articles

Unless you spent the last week hiding under a rock, you’re quite familiar with Trump’s executive order banning travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. People much more articulate than me have opined on the many problems and ethical issues with Trump’s EO. But while individuals and specific groups were the intended target of Trump’s EO, businesses are learning that no one — and no company — can escape Trump’s shrapnel, even if their business has no direct relationship to the policy in question. As more and more corporate boards turn their focus to risk management practices, it appears the President of the United States is creating a whole new practice area. Companies that don’t tread carefully could emerge with a bloody nose, or reputational damage.

Case in point: Uber.

On January 30, 2017, thousands of protesters across the U.S. flooded airports to speak out against Trump’s EO. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance tweeted its support for the protests, calling on all drivers to avoid JFK Airport between 6-7pm. The Alliance pointed out the heightened level of personal risk its largely Muslim workforce faced as a result of Trump’s sanctioned bigotry.

Ninety minutes later, Uber tweeted that it had ‘turned off’ surge pricing at JFK, warning its followers that this could result in longer wait times.

Now, let’s give Uber the benefit of the doubt for a moment.

It’s quite possible Uber saw a business opportunity, and wanted to engender gratitude from its customers. Done well, Uber would be the white knight coming in to save the day for stranded travellers. If that was the intent, the execution was tone-deaf, and as a result, the reaction swift and brutal.

congrats to @Uber_NYC on breaking a strike to profit off of refugees being consigned to Hell. eat shit and die https://t.co/19gbpIc9m9
— HUNTER S. FAILSON (@Bro_Pair) January 29, 2017

Within minutes the #DeleteUber hashtag took, with people sharing screenshots confirming they were deleting the app.

 

i never used it in NYC for a lot of reasons but they won’t see a goddamned penny from me ever again #deleteuber pic.twitter.com/Wh1Yhe5aZa
— matt ? lubchansky (@Lubchansky) January 29, 2017

Clearly, Uber’s evil, right? Not so fast.

If you believe an Uber spokesperson, ‘the decision to turn off surge pricing was made specifically to avoid profiting from increased demand during the protest. The company has previously made a similar commitment to limiting surge pricing during disasters, after being accused of taking advantage of riders in times of need.’

It would appear things are greyer than they first seemed.

They get greyer still, when you consider this piece of information: hours before Uber removed surge pricing at JFK, its CEO, Travis Kalanick sent an email to all Uber employees. The subject? ‘Standing up for what’s right’. Here are some salient passages from that email:

This order has far broader implications as it also affects thousands of drivers who use Uber and come from the listed countries, many of whom take long breaks to go back home to see their extended family. These drivers currently outside of the U.S. will not be able to get back into the country for 90 days. That means they will not be able to earn a living and support their families—and of course they will be separated from their loved ones during that time.

We are working out a process to identify these drivers and compensate them pro bono during the next three months to help mitigate some of the financial stress and complications with supporting their families and putting food on the table.

While every government has their own immigration controls, allowing people from all around the world to come here and make America their home has largely been the U.S.’s policy since its founding. That means this ban will impact many innocent people—an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting.

Which goes to show, that in this hyper-connected world, anger is the emotion that spreads most. We want and assume the worst in everyone, and especially in big companies. Of course, Kalanick has been criticized for joining Trump’s business advisory group, but as we see in his all-staff email, rare is an issue as binary as we interpret it online. Unfortunately, that’s the world we operate in. As soon as a crisis erupts, the company is the villain, guilty until proven innocent. Days after this crisis erupted, and days after Uber clarified its position, people continued to post screenshots showing them deleting Uber from their phones.

As Kalanick discovered, Trump can be bad for business. Within three days of the crisis, with #DeleteUber still a hot meme, Kalanick sent a follow-up memo to his employees announcing that he was leaving the President’s advisory council, making it clear that he and his company did not want to tacitly support the ban. Here’s the full text of his memo:

Earlier today I spoke briefly with the President about the immigration executive order and its issues for our community. I also let him know that I would not be able to participate on his economic council. Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and mapping it to our values. There are a couple that are particularly relevant:

Inside Out – The implicit assumption that Uber (or I) was somehow endorsing the Administration’s agenda has created a perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are.

Just Change – We must believe that the actions we take ultimately move the ball forward. There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that. The executive order is hurting many people in communities all across America. Families are being separated, people are stranded overseas and there’s a growing fear the U.S. is no longer a place that welcomes immigrants.

Immigration and openness to refugees is an important part of our country’s success and quite honestly to Uber’s. I am incredibly proud to work directly with people like Thuan and Emil, both of whom were refugees who came here to build a better life for themselves. I know it has been a tough week for many of you and your families, as well as many thousands of drivers whose stories are heartfelt and heart-wrenching.

Please know, your questions and stories on Tuesday, along with what I heard from drivers, have kept me resilient and reminded me of one of our most essential cultural values, Be Yourself. We will fight for the rights of immigrants in our communities so that each of us can be who we are with optimism and hope for the future.

Travis

As Travis learned the hard way, more than ever, companies need to be in tune with, and attuned to the political sensitives of the markets in which they operate. It’s not enough to ask, ‘is this a good business decision?’ Now, to avoid scandal, or to avoid getting sucked into Trump’s orbit, companies need to ask ‘is this a good political decision?’ Companies need to game out the likely scenarios of its business decisions in the political climate. The consequences often cut deep. The business suffers if it makes the wrong political decision. In truth, we live in a world where walking back a bad decision is becoming nearly impossible. Politics has long been a bloody sport, and increasingly businesses are getting bloody noses by not being attuned to the political realities of the markets they operate in.

Legalized launches today!

Our first two episodes lay out some important considerations for legalizing recreational marijuana use. There are a lot of questions that need answers. For example, how will distribution work? Who will be responsible for what? What will be legal on day one?

But first, before we talk about recreational use, we need to talk about where we are right now — the current regulations and what’s legal and what’s not.

Listen to our first two episodes:

Why We’re doing This Podcast
This is kind of like episode 0.5, to set the stage for our first episode. There are a number of competing objectives and goals with legalizing recreational marijuana use.

What’s Legal, What’s Not
There’s confusion around the current regulations for marijuana. We clarify what’s legal and what’s not, who can sell it, who can buy it, and where dispensaries fit in.

 

 

The result of Ronda Rousey’s long-awaited return to the UFC octagon was swift and brutal. After being undefeated as the women’s bantamweight champion for almost three years and against six challengers, ‘Rowdy’ Ronda Rousey’s fall from MMA grace was swift. In large part, Rousey created the climate that allowed this negativity. Rousey’s reaction to defeat alienated MMA fans and caused opinion to turn against her. If she had managed her image a little differently, she could have mitigated the fallout.

Mixed martial arts is a sport that craves heroes as big and boisterous as the WWE, but offers none of the scripted protection that keeps those stars on top. Rousey exemplified this superstardom. She was seemingly undefeatable and seemingly unenhanced by steroids — her success the result of hard work and dedication.

Then Rousey lost to Holly Holm.

With only two fights in the UFC, social media users laughed off Holm and asked when Rousey would get a ‘real’ fight. And then 59 seconds into the second round, Holm hit Rousey with a devastating head kick that left the champion bloodied and unconscious.

As colour commentator Joe Rogan often warned about other fight predictions, MMA math never works out. There’s too much unpredictability in the sport to simply tally up wins and losses of any one fighter, and too many differences between matches for them to forecast the results for future fights.

Thirteen months later, when Rousey made her return against newly-crowned champ, Amanda Nunes, this fact was made all too clear. Thirty-eight seconds into the first round of the Nunes-Rousey fight, referee Herb ‘Green’ Dean called a stop to the contest, halted Nunes’s flurry of strikes, consoled a barely conscious Rousey, and awarded Nunes the victory.

Thousands of tweets mocking Rousey’s loss poured in from around the world. Anonymous trolls, current and former fighters, even Justin Bieber mocked her — the Biebs turned heads by declaring to Rousey ‘You just got knocked the f*** out.’

Rousey was the first women’s champion in the UFC and the women’s division owes its very existence to the crowds Rousey was able to draw — most of its contenders were brought in initially as opponents for Rousey. Most observers — most of her fans — forget this. Rousey so transcended the world of MMA fandom that a huge chunk of her fanbase had never followed professional fighting before, and many of them didn’t watch fight cards that didn’t include Rousey. For them, Rousey wasn’t just a champion she was the champion. And that rubbed hardcore MMA fans the wrong way. The diehards were the happiest to see Rousey fall, just as they had been to see the fast-talking Irishman Conor McGregor choked out by the frequently-incoherent pothead Nate Diaz.

This desire to see a champion fall comes from the very heart of the UFC. The organization was founded as a way to discover what fighting styles worked. It smashed everything up together, from kung fu to boxing to Russian combat sambo, to see what comes out on top. It’s meant to be a constantly evolving field of diverse martial artists who combine new and unused styles with ancient, time-tested techniques. Opponents are meant to be beaten, but the game is not meant to be won. In her prime, Ronda Rousey was so dominant that she seemed awfully close to winning the game. Fans love seeing someone act like a superhero, but what they love more is a human bringing that hero back down to earth. The game demands the defeat of its greatest fighters, otherwise it doesn’t improve.

When 24-year-old Cody Garbrandt danced (literally danced) his way around Dominick Cruz and propelled himself from the number 8-ranked bantamweight spot to world champ, fans were ecstatic. But none mocked Cruz in the way they had Rousey. In part, that’s because Cruz was humbled by defeat — he admitted that his opponent bested him but vowed that he would be back.

Rousey, on the other hand, went quiet after defeat. Rousey refused interviews and disappeared off social media. The fans that so often turned to Rousey for inspiration were left searching for their hero, who was nowhere to be found.

Rousey’s first public appearance was months after the loss on Ellen. Ellen Degeneres is not known as an expert on mixed martial arts and didn’t pepper Rousey with the difficult questions she would have faced when interacting with the MMA press. This move alienated MMA fans who saw it as self-serving. Rousey, it seemed, had chosen the life of a movie star over rededicating herself to her craft. Fans took this as disrespect for the industry — and themselves as supporters — that had gotten her so far.

During subsequent interviews, Rousey never stated publicly that Holm bested her and has yet to acknowledge that Nunes defeated her. She seems to treat defeat as though it were divorced from her opponent. Rousey never acknowledged her own role in defeat. She portrayed defeat as something that merely happened to her. But people want human heroes, and by not acknowledging her own shortcomings, Rousey gave off the impression that she had learned nothing from her losses. Fans loved the no-nonsense, take-charge attitude of Rousey, but when she seemingly abandoned it in the face of adversity, her fans felt they had been duped by someone who talked one way and acted another. Stars get big when fans build a connection with them and that connection requires authenticity at some level, but Rousey was slowly abandoning her authenticity each time she retreated into isolation after a loss.

If Rousey had come out after defeat humbled and admitted that she had been bested twice by superior strikers, MMA fans would have rallied behind her as they had countless other fighters. Rousey could then go quietly back to camp and work on her striking. Instead, her complete silence came across as entitlement — the belief that she deserved to be champ regardless of how well she performed.

The UFC, recently acquired by the entertainment agency William Morris Endeavor, faces a similar predicament, a classic growing-pains problem for any individual, organization or company with a niche focus looking to expand. The UFC wants to increase its viewership but cannot do so while alienating long-time MMA fans. The UFC needs to find a way to create megastars that continue to embody the spirit of mixed martial arts. There is a major drive in UFC to get its champions on talk shows, in commercials, and as stars in film. But each of these outlets will be seen by fans as a distraction from the hard work of fighting. By trying to go too mainstream, the UFC — like Rousey — risks frustrating fans who tune in not to see scripted action heroes, but skilled fighters who could win or lose from one well-placed fist.

So how do you keep your fan base? Rousey’s life as an MMA star is not over. She has only been out of the game for thirteen months, most of which were spent training. Amanda Nunes is not unbeatable, and Rousey still has caches of goodwill throughout the UFC. But Rousey needs to show fans what they want to see. Rousey can’t show mainstream fans an unstoppable superhero — and it’s impossible to try — but she can show MMA fans a focused, rededicated warrior working her way back to the top. If MMA fans see this, see that Rousey is taking her work and her fans seriously, Rousey could become the fan’s champion again long before she wins back the belt.

Recently, YouTube’s most popular content creator — PewDiePie, a Swedish user/channel known initially for live streams of video games —threatened to delete his account in protest of YouTube’s partnership policy. PewDiePie risked losing 50 million subscriptions — and his reported million-dollar paycheque — to get YouTube to address apparent difficulties with its video distribution model. While PewDiePie’s fight with YouTube continues, his battle helps to illuminate a major change in entertainment: the role of online content and its link to real-world success.

This shift is demonstrated even more glaringly by ongoing rumours that the Late Late Show’s James Corden could replace Stephen Colbert as host of the Late Show. Despite his following from his previous characters on The Daily Show and his own Colbert Report, Colbert has been unable to pull CBS’s late night talk show into the first-place ratings position. Practically since he took the reigns of the show, Colbert has dealt with criticisms that his edgy Comedy Network persona had not transferred well to an earlier, less character-driven timeslot.

Enter James Corden, the British expat most known for his Carpool Karaoke videos where he belts out popular classics accompanied by the likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Elton John. In a short timespan, Corden has evolved from an entertainment unknown into one of the most-watched late-night hosts — on YouTube, that is.

When looking at traditional television ratings, Corden sits at the bottom of the pack, behind Late Night with Seth Meyers — his only competition during his time slot. Similarly, Colbert lags behind his 11:30pm competitors. While he’s slightly ahead of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, he’s well behind Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. Why then would executives at NBC want to switch Colbert for the, apparently, similarly poorly performing Corden? The answer comes from online media.

On their YouTube Channels, Colbert’s struggle is more pronounced. Of the six names in traditional, mainstream late night (Conan, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers and Corden), Colbert has the second fewest YouTube subscribers. The subscriber breakdown is as follows (at the time of writing):

• The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon (NBC): 12,637,000 subscribers
• Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC): 8,770,000 subscribers
• The Late Late Show with James Corden (CBS): 8,478,000 subscribers
• Conan (TBS): 4,584,851 subscribers
• The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: 1,902,000 subscribers
• Late Night with Seth Meyers: 845,000 subscribers

These numbers only show part of the story, however. Colbert and Corden’s shows have yet to hit their two-year mark. Fallon and Meyers have had more than a year on air than their CBS competitors, while Kimmel has been at the helm of ABC’s foray into late night since 2003. With these brief timetables in mind, Corden’s rise is understandably impressive.

Anyone who is a fan of late night talk shows will notice a similarity among the top-ranked hosts’ channels: viral videos. Jimmy Fallon has worked to pull Jay Leno’s traditional Tonight Show closer towards a variety show format, bringing in numerous star-studded segments that are both entertaining and can exist in isolation from the nightly show itself. Kimmel’s ‘Celebrities reading mean tweets’ and man-on-the-street segments are frequently shared on social media. Corden’s previously mentioned Carpool Karaoke is a major hit online along with his other viral segments. And Conan’s channel is brimming with clips of the host doing everything from touring a Cuban rum distillery to buying medicinal marijuana with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart.

Colbert and Meyers, on the other hand, are not known for pre-taped, celebrity-heavy, or man-on-the-street segments. These bottom-tier shows hew much closer to traditional talk show structures with a lengthy monologue, a brief segment performed from behind a desk leading into celebrity interviews and ending with a musical guest. While the other hosts have not abandoned this structure, they have adapted it to the new reality of online entertainment.

When, increasingly, people are cutting their cable and replacing it with online streaming services like Netflix, Crave, Hulu, and YouTube, television shows are confronted with the reality that hour-long investments at set times are no longer the norm for viewers. Media consumers want short clips that can be viewed on their smartphones at their leisure. Colbert and Meyers, while talented entertainers, are producing content stuck in the traditional mold. Fallon and Corden are pulling ahead as late night’s top talent thanks to their ability to adapt to the times and create content that is not only enjoyable to their fans, but easily accessible, as well.

The way we enjoy television is changing. Even the phrase ‘television’ seems outdated in this context, since so little of the entertainment programming we consume is actually on television. If the major broadcast networks are able to ensure their programming is accessible and engaging across formats, then late night institutions like the Late Show and Tonight Show could survive long into the future. If they are unable to make this change, the face of our entertainment will soon more closely resemble PewDiePie than Stephen Colbert.

The UK government recently passed the most aggressive surveillance law in history. Like the Patriot Act a decade ago, the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 sets a new standard for what information governments can access from their citizens in the name of public safety. According to Edward Snowden, it’s ‘the most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy’. Whether it is introducing new powers or legalizing what has been going on in secret for years, the UN Privacy Chief said passing the bill is ‘worse than a scary shift’ — ‘privacy’ as we know it will never be the same and because most of the bill has to do with the Internet, neither will surveillance.

Comparisons to China and Russia are not far off, and referring to the act as unprecedented is not an understatement. Right now, there is no country with as much surveillance capabilities as Great Britain. The bill covers users’ Internet history, smartphone apps, and meta data from calls. It forces service providers to store which websites users visit, for how long, and at what time, for at least a year. For the first time ever, government bodies are legally sanctioned to hack private citizen’s computers and phones and the same law requires technology providers to assist them in doing so. The bill increases the number of agencies with access to this information and reduces the number of safeguards that ensure they have a good reason to have that access in the first place.

For privacy activists in the UK, the lack of initial opposition to the bill and the fact that this is just another step in the slow erosion of privacy is probably scarier than the bill itself. The legislation consolidated changes to how we think about privacy that have been going on since social media and digital communication became part of daily life. It’s not that people necessarily agree with the changes, they’ve just accepted them as inevitable. Not inevitable like gravity, ice cream melting in the sun, or John Gibbons countering lefty hitters with left handed relievers — it’s become a trade off or necessary evil in exchange for something more valuable. The digital world, with integrated feeds, accounts, and profiles catered to our individual personalities, is built on third parties — governments or agencies — accessing our personal data.

Think about everything your phone does. It can search the Internet, check email, make most banking transactions, and order food or a car to your exact location, not to mention your social media and all the different ways it enables both self expression and mass communication. As a society we’ve agreed this is awesome. For all of it to happen, the companies providing these services need to access and share your personal, banking, and location information. This is not really news and even though it may scare people, we’ve long since consented or opted in. Even though the passage of the bill resulted in increases in coverage and led to more aggressive calls for repeal or revaluation, those close to the issue say its changes are here to stay. At most, the language will be edited to be more palatable as the bill goes back to Parliament.

Just hours after a petition against the Investigatory Powers Act reached 10,000 signatures, the government announced plans to appoint a national censor for online pornography and alluded to more stringent restrictions on certain types of adult content that experts warn penalizes sexual minorities while creating a national database of porn-watchers and their fetishes. What used to be private is literally being collected.

The Investigatory Powers Act doesn’t make that much more of your personal data available It formalizes a new standard of privacy by involving the government and consolidating the information you already provide into one place. Government involvement is what generally turns ‘data mining’ into ‘surveillance’. They both involve gathering personal data, the difference is in how that information can be used. Where a company practicing data mining, like Facebook, may use your personal data to ‘improve user experience’ or help sell ads, state institutions can use that same data in far more substantial ways.

It’s not all tacit acceptance, though. There is growing opposition to the bill. The Investigatory Powers Act marks a new standard for what data people consider private and personal and what can theoretically become official state business. There was a time when what you read or watched was not collected for any reason. This is no longer the case. The most sinister reading of the bill is that it allows government to record everything we access. By subjecting leisure activities to a new level of scrutiny, it effectively polices free time. The dark assumption as to why someone would police your free time is that what you’re doing can somehow be used against you. The increase in surveillance has a lot of critics lamenting the death of freedom and quoting Orwell, which is understandable, though if we’re picking dystopias, the situation is probably closer to Brave New World. Neil Postman famously pointed out that the difference between Orwell and Huxley is in how their dystopias are created. In 1984, fear is what drives surveillance and oppresses the public. Brave New World features a similarly repressed society, but people are essentially blackmailed by what brings them joy. The Huxlian idea of private pleasures as the source of government intrusion is what makes The Investigatory Powers Act different from overt censorship even if the end result is the same: people change how they behave online because they’re afraid their digital activities will be revealed.

A recent episode of Black Mirror brings Huxley’s idea to a more contemporary context, using social media to illustrate how constant digital surveillance injects an element of performance into everything we do. The show uses exaggerated situations to explore the consequences of our reliance on various technologies. One episode focuses on a young woman desperate to improve her social score, which correlates to her social rank. People are ranked on a scale from one to five and these scores become a kind of class system. Higher ranked individuals receive preferential treatment and a person’s number becomes a manifestation of their worth as certain services are only available to people with high enough scores. Every real-life interaction is rated and contributes to characters’ overall score, resulting in shallow and disingenuous relationships that are based on pleasing one another. In Black Mirror, the surveillance is by committee. Other people, not the government, are the authority capable of awarding and subtracting points.

Perhaps the most chilling scene in the episode is when the main character, Lacie, has a coffee while ‘working on her socials’ or broadcasting her mundane and traditionally private activities in hopes of getting enough points to raise her overall score. After a series of overly sweet greetings and carefully biting off a small section of a cookie so it looks perfect in the picture she posts online, Lacie winces when she actually goes to take a sip of her coffee. In a split second the effect of constant digital driven surveillance becomes clear: Lacie does not like the coffee she orders every day but continues to do so because people are watching. Her choice of drink flavour is not considered private in a world where these things are expected to be shared online. People might not notice or care what Lacie’s drinking but since she could be awarded points for every aspect of her life, Lacie tailors her behaviour to maximize every small detail for points..

Black Mirror is careful to present a continuum of consent or different characters opting into this perpetual surveillance via social media to different degrees. However, although Lacie could obviously ease up in her quest for more points, opting out of the game entirely is not an option. Even the enlightened, off-the-grid, low-score character has a ‘feed’ and Lacie can quickly scan through her most recent interactions. The show may be hyperbole but its point about the idea of someone watching being just as powerful as actual surveillance is very real.

Constant surveillance as a form of control is not new. Years before smartphones and social media, Jeremy Bentham designed a prison where thousands of inmates would suffer through a similar paranoid performative existence as Lacie’s in Black Mirror. He called it The Panopticon. It’s a circular building with cells on the outside surrounding a tower in the middle for the lone guard or source of surveillance. The guard can see out of the tower but none of the prisoners can see the guard. They know he may be looking but cannot be sure when. Bentham theorized this constant state of maybe being watched would force prisoners to act as if the guard was staring right at them all the time. Applying Bentham’s principle outside of jail and in the context of the Investigatory Powers Act, everything that accesses the Internet becomes a guard tower that may be sending your online activity to a government agency. The act is a big deal because it makes the idea of private social information becoming public a legitimate possibility. That said, just because something is searchable does not necessarily mean someone will look it up. The real fear in surveillance is not from being watched but being judged based on what the watcher saw. If something stands out, people will have more incentive to investigate and pass judgement on whatever behaviour caused the anomaly or is in someway different from the norm. Theoretically, when more data is available, the only way to maintain the same level of privacy as before is to give no reason for people to look at that data even though they now can.

In this data driven world where our most intimate details are available, we can still find comfort in everyone else being equally exposed. Knowing the same discussion has been happening since Bentham, Orwell, and Huxley, it can be comforting to see privacy as a spectrum rather than a fixed concept. What is traditionally private will continue to evolve. It’s likely we will keep enjoying the ability to connect to each other and different devices through new technology. These new devices will determine what information remains off the grid and what you must trade to participate in an increasingly social digital society. The distinction between information not being available and not being acted on will grow much more apparent. As personal data becomes more accessible than ever, anonymity becomes the new privacy. The data is out there but so long as no one has the incentive to access it, any secrets are still as unexposed as they would have been had the data not been collected. This makes perpetual performance to avoid unwanted attention or someone making use of your available personal data the scariest consequence of increased surveillance. Its why Black Mirror is creepy and Bentham’s prison only needs one guard. Perhaps the scariest part about the Investigatory Powers Act is not the government’s increased surveillance abilities, but that we keep changing our behaviour when we feel someone is watching.