If you ever have the pleasure of meeting the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Phil Libin, don’t be alarmed — or offended — when he asks you to pose for a photograph. And when you hand Libin your business card, expect him to take a picture of that, too. Libin might also snap shots of signs and placards around your office, billboards and movie posters he passes on the street, the labels of wine and sake bottles he encounters at restaurants, and untold other scraps that pass through his hands during the course of a day.
Libin is a big, friendly, mustachioed fellow, and though there’s a certain compulsion to the photographing thing, he isn’t actually crazy. He’s simply an ardent proselytizer of his product. Libin is the CEO of Evernote, a software company that’s building what has been called “a backup for your brain.”
All of Libin’s photographs — that shot of you, your office, the movie posters and the wine labels and the random notes — fly into his Evernote account. There, the company’s servers extract meaning from the image data, rendering Libin’s memories searchable.
When he wants to recall the cut of your jib, the name of the sake he ordered last week, the flight number for his recent trip to Vegas, or anything else, Libin can scan his Evernote account by date or keyword. If he searches on “salon writer,” for instance, he’ll come up with my business card, which includes those words. Because Libin can do this anywhere — from his computer or his mobile phone — the software has become, for him, a kind of Google for the real world.
Evernote is a forgetter’s dream, but the tool isn’t only for those of us gone mushy in the brain. In the same way that GPS forever changed our relationship to physical spaces, the permanent, constant archiving of both the monumental and the mundane in life will surely alter how each of us navigates the social realm. During a recent interview, I asked Libin whom he considers his target market. In the mode of a TV pitchman, he answered, “Everyone wants a better memory.” And yet this makes sense: Everyone forgets, and Evernote makes it so you never have to.
The quest for what Libin calls a “human memory extension” is at least a few decades old. In 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush described a theoretical machine he called the “memex” (for “memory extender”), “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” More recently, Gordon Bell, one of the inventors of the Internet, has been obsessively archiving his life as part of a research project for Microsoft.
Evernote combines several recent tech innovations — digital photography, ubiquitous networking, cheap storage and powerful image processing — to make Gordon Bell’s archiving ways possible for ordinary people.
The service runs on a desktop program that works on both Macs and PCs, as well as a Web client for mobile phones (souped-up mobiles with good Web access work best). The software is well-designed and easy to use, though I noticed some small bugs; these are to be expected, as Evernote is currently operating in an invitation-only “beta” mode. (The company gave Salon 3,000 invitations to hand out to readers — click here for yours.)
For now, Evernote is free. When the company launches it to the public — sometime during the next few months — there will be a two-tier service, one free and one for a few dollars per month. The free version will limit how many notes you can add each month; the pay version will be unrestricted.
I’ve been using Evernote for about a month. My own memory is pretty good, and at first I figured I would use it only sparingly; within a few hours, though, I became ravenous, putting everything in Evernote.
The software provides several tools to snap up Web pages, making the decision a no-brainer: See a recipe you like? Save. A restaurant you’d like to visit? Save. An article that offers clever child-rearing techniques? Save — I don’t have a kid, but I will someday, and when I do, I might need that info.
But Evernote’s real power isn’t in the saving of your memories; it’s in the recall. Because Evernote is networked, any bit you add to it becomes available everywhere — when you add a memory on your Mac, you can find it on your PC and on the Web, too. More important, because Evernote mines every image for text, you’ll find information in documents that would normally be hidden to a search program.
The Web page for the restaurant I saved, for instance, was created entirely in Flash — if I’d saved it conventionally, I wouldn’t have been able to search through it. But Evernote brings it up when I type in “restaurant.” (Evernote also lets you add keywords to every note, which helps to recall images that don’t include any text. By combining the service with Jott, a wonderful new voice-recognition Web service, you can even dictate audio notes to Evernote.)
Photo by Phil Libin
The text-recognizing capacity is even more wondrous in photographs. Here’s a picture of a sake bottle that Libin recently snapped.
Evernote managed to decode all the highlighted words — “sake,” “crazy,” “milk” — and will bring up the picture when Libin searches on them.
These days when Libin travels, he puts important documents — flight, hotel, car rental info — into Evernote; it’s much handier, he says, than carrying around a folder stuffed with papers.
Here Libin holds up his ticket for a recent flight. He’s added a sticky note with his hotel information — “stay at the venetian” — that Evernote has managed to decode.
Photo by Phil Libin
The recognition is far from perfect. Evernote had a tough time with my chicken-scratch penmanship. I noticed that it did a poor job on images clogged with text of odd sizes and colors. For example, Evernote recognized very little text in this picture of Times Square:
Libin points out, though, that Evernote is always improving its recognition capabilities — this is in stark contrast to human memory, which degrades over time.
As the years pass, Evernote will keep learning more about every note you save in it. It’ll be able to read all the text in that Times Square picture, and in time it might come to recognize faces, too. This is why Libin snaps photos of everyone he meets; a few decades from now, he’ll be able to type in characteristics — “black-haired adonis,” “delicate features,” “dreamboat” — and be presented with my smiling mug circa 2008.
Notice I said “decades.” Libin is a member of the Long Now Foundation, whose aim is to push society to think about the long-term future — the next 10,000 years. Evernote is built in that spirit: Memories you add now, Libin says, can stay “forever.” Not only will Libin be able to search for my face 30 years from now, but so will his grandkids, and his grandkids’ grandkids.
Such a system will obviously have profound effects on society. Libin, who spent years working in the computer security industry, promises that Evernote will keep your notes safe from prying eyes, but I’m sure some people will be wary of keeping all their memories in a single location for eternity (what if the cops want them?).
And plus, do you want your grandkids seeing what you did — what you were reading, where you were going, who you were meeting — back when you were their age? Aren’t there some things you’d rather not remember forever?
These problems aren’t particular to Evernote. Anyone with an e-mail account, a social networking profile, or a Flickr or YouTube page — anyone who uses the Internet — has been forced to confront the power of computers to make every moment of our lives’ literally unforgettable.
Evernote makes that digital immortality explicit: You can’t yet live forever, but if want, now, you can set your brain free to go on without you.
It isn’t necessary to explain how, in the pilot episode of “MacGyver,” our mulleted, Midwestern hero gets himself trapped inside a top-secret research bunker overflowing with sulfuric acid. Suffice it to say, he needs to find a way out, and probably soon (because government agents are fixing to fire a missile at the bunker to prevent the acid from spilling into a nearby aquifer). Plus, he has to save the people he has found inside (among them a gun-wielding climate scientist who wants destroy the bunker in an effort to set back research into an ozone-layer-ruining weapon of mass destruction). Fortunately, MacGyver has a few chocolate bars, a scrap of sodium metal, a cold capsule, a pair of binoculars and cigarettes.
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.
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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.
Today much of the tech world is sad that the iPhone 3G’s launch is going so miserably. But I’m sad that it’s my last day at Salon.
I’ve accepted a job at Slate, where, starting next week, I’ll be writing a twice-weekly technology column. Machinist will go on a break for a week, after which a guest blogger will bring you the latest tech dish.
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
Update: This post has been updated with comments from Viacom.
In the fall of 1987, a freelance reporter named Michael Dolan learned that judge Robert Bork kept an account at Potomac Video, a D.C. rental shop. This was at the height of the contentious and ultimately failed Senate confirmation hearings for Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court — so naturally, Dolan thought there was a story here, and he went to work on getting a peek at Bork’s video rental history.
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.
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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.”
