Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize–winning former foreign correspondent and the author of seven books, including "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes You Smarter" and "Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention." She lives in northern California.
I think that’s true, in part because we’re all fighting to be seen. In all likelihood, your social networks are very busy places, and more dramatic postings play better. In terms of the interactions that we’re afforded, that we’re allowed, those are also very limited. We kind of take it for granted that there’s a Like button or a Favorite or a heart. There is something very limiting and even infantilizing about that.
You even have things like the people from Tumblr, who said, “we don’t want anyone to get their feelings hurt on Tumblr.” Tumblr’s users themselves are a much more diverse lot. That’s why I wrote about Tumblr ignoring the sheer amounts of pornography on its site—something they don’t want to acknowledge, because it cuts against this image of Tumblr as a very cheery, advertiser-friendly place.
In the book, you quote Tumblr’s CEO, who in 2010 proclaimed, “No advertising ever!” By 2013 he was openly courting advertisers. Ocean acidification is like global warming’s sad, ignored twin. It results, like climate change, from human emissions of greenhouse gases, much of which, we know, are absorbed into the sea, lowering the water’s pH level. And while we don’t talk about it as much, the oceans have already become 30 percent more acidic over the past 200 years, with disastrous consequences for coral reefs, creatures with shells and vulnerable fisheries.
And in the past, finds a new study in the journal Science, such acidification was the catalyst for a mass extinction event that nearly wiped out life on Earth.
It was carbon from extreme volcanic activity, it claims, that ended up in the oceans and triggered the Permian extinction event, a.k.a. the “Great Dying,” in which more than 90 percent of Earth’s marine species and two-thirds of its land animals disappeared.
A team of researchers co-ordinated by the University of Edinburgh figured this out by analyzing rocks in the United Arab Emirates that belonged to the seafloor when the mass extinction event occurred 252 million years ago, and which contain a record of prehistoric acidification. The entire extinction period, they determined, lasted 60,000 years, during which massive eruptions spewed carbon into the atmosphere and began to kill off terrestrial life. But in the last 10,000 years, so much carbon was released that the oceans could no longer absorb it, and instead began to rapidly acidify — putting additional pressures on the already-weakened ecosystem that ultimately became too much for it to withstand.
In a statement, study coordinator Matthew Clarkson called the finding “worrying,” because “we can already see an increase in ocean acidity today that is the result of human carbon emissions.”
The collective emissions produced by the volcanos was probably more than we’d be capable of emitting with our remaining fossil fuel reserves, the authors say, but we have one important thing in common with that past era: the rate at which we’re adding carbon to the atmosphere. And it was that rapid rate, the authors explain in the study, that drove the devastating acidification in the past.
This may ultimately be the problem with having all these current companies being venture-backed, which is that you then you have venture capitalists expecting huge returns. So these companies have to scale-up really big, and the main way to do that is to be free and to collect lots of user data. And even the most idealistic of them, and Tumblr was idealistic in its own way, they eventually say, “Well now, we have to satisfy our investors, and we have to make money, so advertising it is.”
Imagine if Tumblr weren’t so huge, but still were a similar kind of space, with similar capabilities, and a similar sort of culture—and people paid ten buck a year. It wouldn’t be this massive company that we all talk about. But it would have a much better chance to preserve its identity, and really just to be more true and more open to its users.
You described the web today as a “clutch of corporate fiefdoms.” What would it look like to have a truly public space online? I like Tyson, and I believe he does important work in advocating for and defending science to the general public, even though I’ve criticized him for his views on philosophy before. So I’m always interested in reading pieces about him, especially when they have a sensational-seeming headline like the one mentioned. And, while Tyson doesn’t defend Scientology because he’s secretly a member, what he has to say about it is somewhat worrying nonetheless.
The interviewer begins by asking Tyson his opinion on the current state of science, but then quickly pivots to Scientology because “the intergalactic story of Xenu does encroach on your territory a bit.” Tyson responds cautiously, mentioning by way of comparison the “crazy” Catholic belief that the Eucharist wafer is literally transformed into the body of Christ during Mass. He then elaborates:
“What matters is not who says who’s crazy, what matters is we live in a free country.