A Reddit Co-Founder's Devastating One Line Takedown of Facebook

The Aspen Institute

"Facebook makes me hate the people I know, and Reddit makes me love the people I don't." -- Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder, sharing one of his favorite quotes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. 

He added, "the more we can do to expand beyond our friend network, the more we can expand to understand people all over the world we might not necessarily interact with, I want to invest in that." 

Mark Zuckerberg isn't here, but if he sends along a devastating one line takedown of Reddit I'll happily publish it. 

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Kickstarters of Yore: Mozart, Lady Liberty, Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope would like to know: "Hey, dude, will you help fund my Kickstarter?" (Wikimedia Commons/Megan Garber)

Kickstarter may be one of "the world's most innovative companies." It may be changing the way producers -- of art, of tech, of toys -- relate to their consumers. It may be a distinctly digital phenomenon: of the web, by the web, for the web.

But, for all that, Kickstarter is not totally new. In a lot of ways, in fact, it is very, very old.

At a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival this afternoon, Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen talked with Walter Isaacson about the historical roots of the Kickstarter model. It wasn't just the Medici or the Church that funded the arts, Chen said. Artists themselves have also looked to the crowd, directly, to get funding for their projects. 

Alexander Pope, when he translated The Iliad from Greek to English, had a group of about 750 people who subscribed to the work, essentially micro-funding its publication, Chen said. And as a reward for effectively "backing" the project, "they got their names inscribed in the first edition." Mozart looked to a similar model to fund the composition of one of his concertos, Chen said. ("Actually, the first time he tried to fund it, he didn't raise the money" -- he had to try again the next year before successfully funding his work.) And the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was funded by more than 100,000 people.

So Kickstarter's crowdfunding model, in other words, is neither as new nor as unique as it might seem. It represents an innovation in degree rather than kind. As Walter Isaacson summed it up: "This ain't a new idea; there's a long history of it."

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The Spy Photo That Fooled NPR, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, and Me

Wikimedia Commons

It's a blurry image. But in some ways that makes it the perfect portrait of Mary Bowser, an African American woman who became a Union spy during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House. What better representation of a spy who hid in plain sight than a photograph whose subject stares straight at the viewer yet whose features remain largely indecipherable? Small wonder the photograph has been circulated by NPR, Wikipedia, libraries, history projects, and in my book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser. There's only one problem: The woman in the photograph was no Union spy. How did we get it so wrong?

Mary Bowser left behind a sparse historical trail. One early clue comes from a 1900, Richmond, Virginia, newspaper story about a white Union spy named Elizabeth Van Lew. In the story, the reporter included the tantalizing detail that before the war, Van Lew freed one of her family's slaves and sent her North to be educated. The young woman later returned to Richmond and was placed in the Confederate White House as part of Van Lew's spy ring. Van Lew's own Civil War-era diary describes her reliance on an African American referred to only as Mary, who was a key source for Van Lew's intelligence network. Nearly half a century after the war, Van Lew's niece identified the black woman as Mary Bowser, a revelation included in a June 1911 article in Harper's Monthly.

Numerous books and articles repeated the tale of Bowser's espionage, often embellished and without any verifiable sources. The advent of the Internet made it especially easy for the story to circulate, and a growing interest in black history and women's history provided a steady audience for pieces about Bowser. Online pieces about Bowser could easily include an illustration -- if one could be found.

As far as I can determine, the photograph began circulating in 2002, when Morning Edition ran a story about Bowser, and NPR included the photograph on their website, with a caption crediting it to "James A. Chambers, U.S. Army Deputy, Office of the Chief, Military Intelligence." A radio network might seem an unlikely venue for circulating a photograph, but NPR webpages are rife with images supporting each radio story, a fact that exemplifies the extent to which the Internet has made accessing and distributing visual content not only easy but seemingly necessary. (Try to find a popular, public-facing web page without any visuals.)

When my publisher, HarperCollins, asked for images to include in my novel, I dutifully sent the picture purportedly of Bowser. With photographs of Van Lew, Jefferson Davis, and other Civil War figures easy to find, it seemed only fair to feature a picture of Bowser herself. Cautiously, I captioned the image as "rumored to be of Mary Bowser." Ultimately, I couldn't resist the urge to show what Bowser looked like, even though elements of the photograph had always troubled me.

As historian and expert on internet hoaxes T. Mills Kelly warns, we should be skeptical about any Internet source that fills a gap in the historical record too neatly. What was the likelihood that a woman for whom we have no birth or death dates, who used several aliases throughout her life, and who lived during the earliest decades of photography, happened to leave a clearly documented studio portrait?

My doubts about the image grew when I unearthed several post-war sourcescorroborating Bowser's participation in the Richmond espionage ring. One of these documents indicates that in June of 1867, the slave-turned-spy, then using the surname Garvin, left the U.S. for the West Indies; after that date, she disappears from the historical record. But both the dress the figure in the photograph wears and the chair next to which she stands appear to be from a much later period. Could the only surviving portrait of Bowser really have been taken years, perhaps decades, after the woman herself otherwise seems to have vanished?

Diligence, doubt, and dumb luck -- the great triumvirate of historical research -- finally led me to an answer. In 2011, I'd contacted both NPR librarian Kee Malesky and the military office listed in NPR's original caption for the photograph, but neither could provide any information about the image. Despite this seeming dead end, I kept seeking the original, and in January of 2013, I mentioned the mysterious provenance of the photograph to Paul Grasmehr, reference coordinator at the Pritzker Military Library. He put me in touch with Lori S. Tagg, command historian for the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, which inducted Bowser in 1995. Tagg searched their records and determined that "the Bowser photo most likely came from ... the Virginia State Library Pictures Collection."

This lead didn't initially seem promising. Now known as the Library of Virginia, this institution contains no reference in its catalog to an image of Bowser. But when I contacted Dana Puga in their Prints and Photographs Collection, she confirmed that the famed photograph was indeed on file in the library, "in the form of a cabinet card from the Petersburg Studio [of] C. R. Rees."

Quick research (on the Internet, I confess!) revealed that C. R. Rees took his first picture -- a daguerreotype -- around 1850. Cabinet cards began to be produced in the 1860s, suggesting a slim possibility that Mary Bowser might have posed for one. But C.R. Rees didn't open a studio in Petersburg, Virginia, until around 1880, making it unlikely any image captured there was of my spy. Luckily, a few months later a speaking engagement at the Museum of the Confederacy brought me to Richmond, Virginia, where I could at last view the elusive original.

This is the moment a historian lives for -- cradling a rare primary source in hand. And it was just as informative as I'd hoped. On the back of the cabinet card was written the name Mary Bowser, and the name was repeated on the attached mailing envelope, along with a street address in Petersburg.

Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia

So could this be my spy after all? The answer became clear when I turned the cabinet card over:

Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia

There, staring straight at the camera, was Mary Bowser, her features easily recognizable -- unlike the blurry version found online. Just as clear was the date the image was created: 1900. A better match for the clothing and furniture, but not for the spy, who by the turn into the twentieth century would have been about sixty years old. The image is of Mary Bowser ... just not the Mary Bowser we've been claiming her to be.

Having my suspicions about the photograph's authenticity confirmed left me more frustrated than vindicated. It doesn't take any advanced training to look at a clearly dated artifact and ascertain whether it could reasonably relate to a figure whose active moment in history occurred decades earlier. Whoever cropped the image to the form in which it recurs online removed a critical piece of historical evidence. But the ease with which NPR, US Army Intelligence, and I have all participated in the mistaken circulation of this image also reveals how much our expectations of history are products of the way we live in the 21st century.

As a current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reminds us, the Civil War was more or less contemporaneous with the advent of photography, resulting in an unprecedentedly visual experience of the conflict, even for Americans who never ventured anywhere near a battlefield. The subsequent century and a half of technological advances in capturing and reproducing images have so substantially increased our expectation -- our demand -- for reliable, historic visual sources that it can be difficult for us to understand how ahistoric this desire is. But in Mary Bowser's own era, individuals didn't have our expectations of visual certainty. They were far less likely to know what someone, even a public figure, looked like, as contemporary descriptions of Bowser reveal.

A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle who attended a lecture the former spy gave in September of 1865 described her as so "strongly resembling" the prominent abolitionist speaker Anna Dickinson that "they might, indeed, easily be mistaken for twin sisters." Given that Anna Dickinson was white, this description suggests that the speaker was light enough to pass. Yet when Mary first returned to Richmond in 1860, she was arrested for going out without a pass, indicating that she was visually recognizable as "colored" and therefore assumed on sight either to be a slave in need of a pass or a free black in need of proof of her legal status. And when she happened to meet Charles Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1867, Beecher described her as "a Juno, done in somber marble ... Her complexion was a deep brunette, her features regular, and expressive, her eyes exceedingly bright and sharp."

How are we to understand these contradictory sources? In an era in which photography was still in its infancy, it was rare to have a detailed sense of what someone beyond your immediate acquaintance looked like. The allusion to Anna Dickinson likely made sense to readers of the Eagle not as a specific physical description of the former intelligence agent but simply as a marker for the still unusual spectacle of a female speaker addressing an audience on political issues of the day. Although by our standards it might be regarded as an inaccurate comparison, the Eagle's description filled an expectation specific to its era, just as the photo purportedly of Bowser filled an expectation specific to our own era.

Bowser's story evidences the wonderful truth that Americans of all backgrounds contributed to our history. But the enormous holes in what we have of her biography remind us that gender, race, and class also shaped how millions of Americans went unrecorded in what we rely on as the historical record, because they were restricted from holding property, voting, leaving wills, or being accurately recorded in censuses. Wanting to commemorate an African American woman who played such a dramatic part in the Civil War is laudable. Expecting to have a photograph of her was borderline ludicrous. (Consider that even what seems to most Americans today like basic information about the Civil War, the number of military deaths during the conflict, remains a matter of estimation and conjecture.)

The story of the mistaken Mary Bowser reveals how an interest in history, especially women's history and black history, can blind us to how much about the past remains unknowable. The paradox of the information age is that our unprecedented access to information feeds an expectation that every search will yield plentiful -- and accurate -- results. But the type of evidence that our 21st-century sensibilities most desire may be the least likely to exist.

Uncovering the past is arduous work: Compare the ease with which an Internet search turns up the falsely labeled, cropped image of Mary Bowser with the number of sources I persistently contacted over a period of several years before locating the original cabinet card. Alas, in the age of the Internet, it may prove nearly impossible to curtail the use of that image as an avatar for the elusive slave-turned-spy, despite the definitive proof that it isn't her.

Probing how our own desires shape our understanding of history can be revelatory. If a genie granted me the ability to learn any three things about Bowser, I wouldn't choose what she looked like -- it's not nearly as important as understanding the choices she made that led to her extraordinary espionage, the dangers she faced in that position, or how she understood her own role in the struggle to end chattel slavery. But in telling her story, I admit I still find it hard not to want to offer a visual image, to present her in the way that is so quick, and so ubiquitous, today.

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Y U No Go Viral: The Emerging Science of Memes

Bauckhage et al.

More and more of the things that set the internet on fire are of that species of charmingly moronic pairing of text and image that allows even the post-literate to feel like they have partaken of a shared cultural moment. And now, scientists are beginning to understand how the curiously addictive visual tropes known as "memes" are born, why they die, and whether or not it's possible to predict which will "go viral" and be harvested by the night-soil merchants up at meme warehouses like Cheezburger.

Treating memes like genes tells us which are likely to spread
The internet, of course, was barely in its infancy when Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, coined the term "meme" back in 1976. And he meant it as a much more nuanced concept, encompassing pretty much any idea that is good at propagating from one human brain to another -- whether it is dialectical materialism or the tune to Happy Birthday.

But Dawkins was deliberate in his comparison of memes to genes. Like the molecular units of inheritance, memes "reproduce" by leaping from one mind to another, "mutate" as they are re-interpreted by new humans, and can spread through a population. The internet has radically accelerated the spread of memes of all kinds; but it has also led to the rise of a specific kind of meme, the kind encapsulated by a phrase or a picture. And importantly for scientists, the life of a such a meme is highly measurable.

New research from Michele Coscia of Harvard University goes so far as to suggest a decision tree -- which is sort of like a flow chart -- that can show at any given point in an internet meme's life how likely it is to go viral. In order to generate this chart, Coscia tracked 178,801 variants of 499 memes, all gathered from what is arguably the internet's biggest clearinghouse for memes, Quickmeme.

Michele Coscia

This decision tree is a bit challenging to parse, but here goes. The number at the top, 35.47%, is the total proportion of all the memes Coscia analyzed that were "successful." By his definition, success meant receiving a high enough score on Memebase, where users can vote a meme up or down. (His threshold for "success" was necessarily somewhat arbitrary.)

Among these successful memes, an interesting phenomenon emerges. Those that hit an above-average peak of popularity at some point in their life were less likely, overall, to ultimately break the "success" threshold. Memes that were shared more consistently over time, rather than a great deal all at once, were more likely to ultimately rack up enough points.

In the attention economy, memes do battle to the death

If you think Nature is red in tooth and claw, you have yet to stare longingly at a website's analytics dashboard, quietly willing an article you wrote to go viral. (Not that anyone at Quartz has ever done this.) In the attention economy, memes compete for a finite pool of attention, representing all the time everyone spends on the internet. Which means that for one meme to become popular, some other meme must pass into obscurity.

Coscia's data crunching revealed that memes that were "more competitive" than others -- that is, whose rise in popularity tended to correlate with the fall in popularity of other memes -- were more likely to succeed overall.

But memes that travel in packs do best of all

Coscia identified a number of "meme organisms" -- clusters of memes that tend to do well together. He doesn't speculate about why, exactly, these memes' fates seem to be linked together, but a look at meme cluster #45, consisting of two memes (the average number in a cluster was 4.8) suggests a strange sort of logic to their linkage.

(Michele Coscia)

Perhaps (this is my speculation) one interpretation of meme organisms is that certain memes seem to capture the zeitgeist. Thus, memes could have seasonal patterns, or even follow the anxieties and fads of the day, as suggested by trends in the news. Or perhaps memes that remind you of one another do well because they feed off one another's attention. Just as genres emerge in music, literature and art, so too in internet memes.

Memes have a life of their own, independent of who shares them

Coscia notes that most previous research on how things go viral has sought to map the social interconnections of those who are sharing content. Thus, studies of how news is shared on, say, Twitter seek to map who are the most influential sharers of information in any given news cycle.

Nodes at the center of these maps of how news spreads represent people with influence online. (Weng et al.)

But Coscia completely ignored who was sharing which memes -- all of his data came entirely from the scores that memes receive on Quickmeme -- and yet he was still able to discern patterns about which kind of memes would go viral. It's not surprising that the underlying structure of the internet, a given website, and the human brain should all have an effect on making some things more likely to spread than others, but in his attempt to qualify the characteristics of this collective system, Coscia showed that memes can have intrinsic characteristics that make them more likely to succeed. Granted, these qualities aren't apparent until a meme has already begun to spread, but once identified, they help predict how well it might do at some point in the future.

People get bored quickly, and are surprisingly predictable about what they'll share

Past research about memes shows two things that should surprise no one, but are worth emphasizing: If you can figure out what someone is interested in, you can predict how likely she is to share a piece of content. And the more similar a piece of content is to what she has shared before, the more likely she is to share it. In other words, affinity groups rule the web.

"Relationship between the probability of retweeting a message and its similarity to the user's interests, inferred from prior posting behavior." (Weng et al.)

Also, memes have a half-life. They become popular, and then, taken as a whole, they are consumed and then tossed on the scrap-heap of history.

While their individual histories vary, on average the slow disappearance of interest in a meme is highly predictable. (Weng et al.)

No one has any idea what makes something go viral in the first place

Attempts to predict what will go viral on the internet are based on the past behavior of a meme. As Coscia emphasizes in his work, no one has yet to rigorously demonstrate, in advance, why any particular type of content goes viral. This sort of prognostication remains an art rather than a science.

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U.S Government Surveillance: Bad for Silicon Valley, Bad for Democracy Around the World

Germans protest U.S. data-collection programs at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. (Digitale Gesellschaft/Flickr)

In the public debate thus far over the NSA's mass surveillance programs, Americans have obsessed over our right to protect our emails, phone calls, and other communications from warrantless spying. But an issue that is just as important has been almost completely ignored: should the U.S. government be collecting the communications of foreigners without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing? Unlike spying on U.S. citizens, where the government may well be breaking the law, spying on foreigners is almost certainly legal. But is it wise? We don't think so. Unfettered U.S. spying on foreigners will cause serious collateral damage to America's technology companies, to our Internet-fueled economy, and to human rights and democracy the world over. Rampant surveillance harms both privacy and our long-term national security.

Foreigners don't vote in American elections, so perhaps it's not surprising that U.S. law throws them under the privacy bus. "If you are a U.S. person,"President Obama (inaccurately) assures us, "the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls." But the government doesn't disguise its broad snooping on foreigners. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed recently that the NSA "targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose."

The legal basis for wide-scale Internet spying on foreigners is set out in black and white in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA allows collection of "foreign intelligence information," a grant of authority which goes well beyond counterterrorism or national security to include "information with respect to a foreign power or foreign territory that relates to ... the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States." In the original version of FISA, individuals could only be targeted if they were "agents of foreign powers," but 2008 amendments to the statute did away with that limitation. Thus, FISA as it now stands authorizes warrantless surveillance of any non-U.S. individual reasonably believed to be located abroad, allowing for the interception of the most private kind of information so long as it "relates to" U.S. foreign affairs. That language is broad enough to allow the U.S. to seize almost any sort of foreign communication, on the grounds that a communication might relate in some way to a foreign-affairs interest of the United States.

For foreigners who don't regularly read American surveillance statutes, this all came as an unpleasant surprise. And the details of how the NSA administers the mass surveillance programs do not make the surprise any more palatable. Individuals subject to NSA surveillance are almost never notified. The proceedings authorizing the surveillance are secret. The orders and directives are classified. The Internet companies that respond to the U.S. government's information demands are under gag order, or otherwise obligated not to disclose. And from a foreigner's perspective, all this happens at the request of a government they can't hold to account and is approved by a secret foreign court they can't petition.

In addition to its broad legal authority to spy on foreigners, the U.S. now has a distinct technological advantage in doing so. In the past, the nature of the telecommunications infrastructure meant that NSA commonly had to operate abroad to intercept in real-time phone calls between non-Americans. But today, most communications flow over the Internet and a very large percentage of key Internet infrastructure is in the United States. Thus, foreigners' communications are much more likely to pass through U.S. facilities even when no U.S. person is a party to a particular message. Think about a foreigner using Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter -- billions of these communications originate elsewhere in the world but pass through, and are stored on, servers located in the U.S.

With so few legal or technical checks on the U.S. government's power to snoop, Internet users look to U.S. Internet companies to serve as gatekeepers. Fortunately, some U.S.-based Internet companies also have a pro-privacy streak, and view themselves as critical checkpoints in the surveillance infrastructure. Here are just two examples: In 2007, Yahoo unsuccessfully challenged the Protect America Act, a precursor law to the updated FISA. More recently, an unknown company brought a case before the FISA court which resulted in a secret 2011 holding that the NSA had violated the Fourth Amendment.

Yet, Internet companies are in a terrible position to rein in government overreach. The court processes and the reasons for surveillance are kept secret from the companies. The cases that interpret the government's powers under the law are secret. And for whatever protections FISA might afford to Americans, it serves no such role for foreigners, who comprise a growing majority of any global company's customers. When the government comes to an Internet company with a lawful but secret court order signed by a judge and demanding certain data, they can review the order skeptically. They can judiciously select the responsive information. They can bring a secret lawsuit in the FISA court to challenge the secret law on behalf of their international clients who have speculative Fourth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. But beyond these usually quixotic efforts, the companies' powers are limited.

As a result, from the perspective of many foreign individuals and governments, global Internet companies headquartered in the U.S. are a security and privacy risk. And that means foreign governments offended by U.S. snooping are already looking for ways to make sure their citizens' data never reaches the U.S. without privacy concessions. We can see the beginnings of this effort in the statement by the vice president of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, who called in her June 20 op-ed in the New York Times for new EU data protection rules to "ensure that E.U. citizens' data are transferred to non-European law enforcement authorities only in situations that are well defined, exceptional and subject to judicial review." While we cheer these limits on government access, the spying scandal also puts the U.S. government and American companies at a disadvantage in ongoing discussions with the EU about upcoming changes to its law enforcement and consumer-privacy-focused data directives, negotiations critical to the Internet industry's ongoing operations in Europe.

Even more troubling, some European activists are calling for data-storage rules to thwart the U.S. government's surveillance advantage. The best way to keep the American government from snooping is to have foreigners' data stored locally so that local governments - and not U.S. spy agencies -- get to say when and how that data may be used. And that means nations will force U.S.-based Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to store their user data in-country, or will redirect users to domestic businesses that are not so easily bent to the American government's wishes.

So the first unintended consequence of mass NSA surveillance may be to diminish the power and profitability of the U.S. Internet economy. America invented the Internet, and our Internet companies are dominant around the world. The U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive golden goose.

Even worse, a shift away from U.S.-based Internet services is a blow to free expression around the world. We expect U.S.-based Internet companies to resist authoritarian governments that ask for help squelching political dissent. That resistance is good for global democracy, and good for the United States. Of course, U.S. technology companies' response to such demands have not always been exemplary. Rebecca Mackinnon's 2012 book details corporate complicity with repressive regimes' censorship and surveillance. Yet, without question, the role of Internet firms, especially those based in America, is a net plus for democracy abroad. Having Twitter in the U.S. helped when the U.S. State Department asked it in 2009 to delay its regularly scheduled maintenance to ensure activists can communicate during the Iranian elections. It is much harder to say no to a foreign government when a business has employees and data in that country.

In this way, the EU push for local data storage plays right into what some have called the "cyber sovereignty movement," an effort by many nations for more national control over the Internet within their own borders. But unlike current discussions in Europe, those demands are not motivated by a desire to protect civil liberties. To the contrary, authoritarian countries want to censor, spy on, and control Internet access within their own borders. These nations -- Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and others -- unsuccessfully pushed for changes to the Internet's infrastructure at the International Telecommunications Union meeting last December in Dubai. The growth of cyber-sovereignty would be a serious blow to the spread of liberal democracy worldwide. The U.S. government's fervor for Internet surveillance has now provided advocates for such cyber-sovereignty with new privacy-motivated allies and a great set of talking points.

President Obama recently chided Americans concerned with NSA surveillance for our naïveté, saying "you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy." But this administration's rhetoric is short-sighted and depressing when, in fact, rampant surveillance harms our long-term security. Given the Internet's role in empowering democracy activists the world over, the State Department now ranks support for an open and uncensored Internet as one of it fundamental missions. We think this is unquestionably correct. But, we can't have secret warrantless mass surveillance -- of Americans or of foreigners -- and also enjoy Internet-fueled economic, democratic, and political empowerment. It is time to demand both security and privacy, for everyone -- Americans and foreigners alike -- before it's too late.

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