Farhad Manjoo

Martha Stewart is not, as many see her, just a shrewd woman who recognized that magazines and TV shows that teach us how to better decorate our homes might mean big bucks. Were she only that, she’d have been quickly replaced. No, Martha must be seen as a pioneer of a novel American business sensibility, a philosophy that recognizes a recent revolution in the way Americans decide how to buy stuff.

Specifically, Martha was among the first business people to capitalize on the mass public’s increasing consideration of aesthetics — of beauty, luxury, comfort and style. Martha also apprehended the blurring of the line between highbrow and lowbrow culture, and the emergence of what writer John Seabrook calls “Nobrow.” In spotting these trends, Martha transformed herself from a mere tastemaker into an American corporate institution, closer to Starbucks than to Julia Child. Her critics can question her niceness, her ethics, her authenticity, her decorating skills, even her cooking. They can put out unflattering, unauthorized biographies, and they can throw her in the slammer. But Martha will survive because her business is based on a solid, innovative idea: Americans like Good Things™.

This new American appreciation for good things has been most deftly described by Virginia Postrel, an economics columnist at the New York Times, and the author of “The Substance of Style,” one of the most fascinating business books of the last few years. As Postrel points out, globalization and technological advances have made it easy for companies to produce products that are cheap and that work well. But if every product is cheap and does its task — if a toilet brush can be made in Asia for next to nothing — how can companies make their specific products interesting? “In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out,” Postrel writes. How do you charge more for a toilet brush? By making one with style.

A host of American companies have latched on to this idea. You can buy a toilet brush for a few dollars at any drugstore. But at Target, you can also buy an $8 toilet brush designed by acclaimed architect Michael Graves. And if you’re really a showoff you can try Excalibur, the $32 toilet brush by French designer Philippe Starck. It didn’t take Martha to push American businesses to see that they could differentiate their products based on looks. But Martha, Postrel tells me, was a pioneer in emphasizing Americans’ aesthetic sensibilities. Before Martha, we certainly cared what our homes looked like. But how much did we care? Did we think about our toilet brushes? Would we have seen the need — and you have to admit, there is a penetrating, cultural need — for that stylish $8 scrubber?

Martha showed us the way. “She has done a lot to make consumers more aesthetically conscious in the goods they purchase and the things they do,” Postrel says. Martha came along at just the right time — the 1990s — a time of iMacs and Bilbao — when Americans began to open their eyes to the new look around them. “It was easier not just for consumers but for the media to focus on a specific person to describe the rise in aesthetic emphasis,” Postrel says. “In that sense, she provided a helpful transition” to the new consumerism.

Postrel, who is a libertarian, celebrates rather than disdains the emergence of consumerist style, effectively arguing that fashionable products are good for society. Having a choice in toilet brushes isn’t crass; spending $8 on one that looks good isn’t immoral. Postrel believes that stylish goods allow us to indulge, and cultivate, our creativity, giving us room to express our personality through the things we buy. So while she appreciates Martha, Postrel is also a bit critical of the style guru for putting forward a top-down aesthetic ideal, one that “emphasizes an aspiration to be like Martha as opposed to being like yourself.”

This is a valid point, as some Martha fans no doubt do prefer to be Martha, or at least to worship her blindly, rather than express their own sense of style. But maybe the impulse to be like Martha isn’t so bad — maybe we need her guiding hand. After all, the spread of style across the American consumer landscape in recent years is not an entirely easy thing for many people to understand or know how to navigate. Even if Martha at times may stifle our consumerist creativity, don’t many of us appreciate the way she guides us through the crowded marketplace of stylistic choices?

Seabrook — whose book “Nobrow” argues that mass culture has become a source of status rather than the antithesis of style — seems to see Martha in this way. In a world where labels like “highbrow” and “lowbrow” have lost all meaning, where the work of an architect like Graves can be found at Target, it’s difficult to know what “taste” is. No longer is a well-made item the epitome of good taste. Nor is an expensive item always better-looking and in “better taste” than a cheap one. In Nobrow reality, we need tastemakers, and Martha, Seabrook writes, is at the forefront of this group.

“Stewart is saying, in effect, that if you follow these complicated and time-consuming instructions — if you put this parchment under your tablecloths, and put these rose petals in the napkins, and set out these different bits of colored glass in wooden bowls on the table — then you’ll have good taste,” Seabrook writes. “Having access to Stewart’s taste is like having insider information. It used to be that only the élite had access to insider information.” Now, thanks to Martha, everyone can have it.

Seabrook, who was writing before Martha went to jail, when the worst that could be said about her was that she was mean, added that it isn’t a “blot on her authority that, according to the biography by Jerry Oppenheimer, ‘Just Desserts,’ she is foulmouthed and dirty-minded. Just as people can deplore Clinton’s morals and like him as a President, so people can deplore Martha’s crassness and commercialism and like her as a tastemaker.”

Martha’s prison stint only underscores this point and points out the innovativeness of her business. The fact that her empire hasn’t been knocked out by her conviction, and even appears to be the rise, shows that it’s not based solely on her image or on the impeccability of her ethics. Martha’s business is built, instead, on a deeper idea, one at the heart of the new American culture: that material goods are ultimately expressions of personal taste.

When you choose the lampshade you’ll put in your living room, or the bottles where you’ll store your dishwashing soap, or even what you’ll eat for dinner — you’re saying something about yourself. If you decide to forgo a meal at McDonald’s in favor of a recipe in Everyday Food, Martha’s newest magazine, you’re saying something about your sense of style, grace, gentility, culture. Your taste.

Maybe we always understood this; it certainly seems like common sense that consumption equals self-expression. But figuring out what and how to consume — how to express yourself — isn’t easy, and Martha should be thanked for democratizing taste. In the same way that Starbucks brought lattes to the heartland, Martha brought taste to the masses, making style a commodity that we could all enjoy, provided we put enough time and effort into the matter.

As long as Americans care about image — an axiomatic proposition — we can count on Martha to guide us through the elements of style.

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”