Congress seeks to tame the Internet

Fearing Web censorship, the tech world unites against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act

By Nancy Scola

(Credit: iamanuj.com)

Topics:Internet Culture, Stop the Online Piracy Act

Ever since the days of Napster, the recording industry and movie industry have treated the Internet as a place on the map marked “Here be dragons.” For the last decade, Hollywood and big music have spent time not innovating, but trying to get the U.S. Congress to help them tame the Internet. Over the years, they’ve floated a variety of legislative mechanisms to do that. The latest is a House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as it is known, has Internet advocates boiling — and with good reason.

While the Motion Picture Association of America and its allies rolled out their attorney, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, to say that the bill would “protect creators of speech, as Congress has done since this nation was founded, by combating its theft,” many in the technology world roared disapproval. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick compared SOPA to the Internet restrictions used by repressive regimes; “Setting up such a system in the US would be an epic mistake,” he wrote. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote that the bill gives the government and private companies “unprecedented powers to remove websites on the flimsiest of grounds.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill “a dangerous wish list.” The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington said SOPA would cause “broad collateral damage to freedom of expression and privacy.”

Leading Internet companies, including AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga, teamed up in a Washington-speak letter drily objecting to the bill. Google’s Eric Schmidt was blunter. ”The solutions are draconian,” he said in an appearance at MIT. The bill “would require ISPs to remove URLs from the Web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked.”

When it comes to talking about SOPA, it is important to remember this: You can think that “intellectual property” infringement (not only of movies and music, but knockoff Nikes sold online) is bad for the American economy and still think the legislation is a disaster. Not only would the bill likely do little to address the problem of online content fraud and counterfeiting, but it takes aim at the core features of the Internet that have contributed a great deal to the American economy.

Congress, the political press and lobbyists for the entertainment industries like to frame this fight as one between giants. In one corner, the MPAA, RIAA and others decrying the “lawlessness” of the Internet and in the other, Google, Facebook and other big tech firms defending their business. But SOPA isn’t just about corporate battles. For all the the rhetoric, this isn’t even really about copyright. This is about the Internet — and more to the point, the infrastructure and operations of the Internet that make the Internet the Internet. SOPA targets search engines, Internet service providers, ad networks and payment networks precisely because those components are so central to the functioning of the Internet. Those are digital forces that should be messed with only with the greatest of care.

Here, in a nutshell, is what SOPA does. Under the bill, the U.S. attorney general can, with court approval, require that search engines, ISPs, and advertising networks and payment companies stop dealing with foreign-based websites that are deeply engaged in copyright infringement, including blocking a website’s name from connecting back to the site’s IP address. Google, for example, could be forced to block listings for targeted sites. Other sections of the bill puts copyright holders in a position to demand that ad and payment networks stop doing business with websites based in the United States and abroad when those sites are found to have engaged in prohibited behavior when it comes to copyright.

Critics say that the bill is so broadly written that it incriminates sites that are designed in such a way that make policing copyright difficult, from Facebook to Dropbox to whatever new social network the kids in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program are cooking up. That new vulnerability might scare off not only inventors, but investors.

And, as far as the domain name parts of the bill are concerned, the approach is largely pointless from a technical perspective. The bill targets file-sharing sites like the Pirate Bay that enable users to download movies without paying. Search engines would have to excise the name. But hard-core pirates are simply going to traffic in IP addresses. For example, copy and paste “194.71.107.15″ in your browser. The Pirate Bay should still pop up, and there’s nothing Google can do about it. Still, the damage is done. What was once an international system for getting around the Internet is fractured; SOPA opponents point out that it threatens to undo all the work done to harden the domain name system in federal and private cybersecurity efforts.

SOPA would overturn a long-standing presumption under U.S. law that while Internet players are certainly responsible for complying with the law, they’re not deputies in the copyright battles. During a hearing in the House this week on SOPA, Maria Pallante, the U.S. register of copyrights, testified that SOPA rejects the idea that Internet companies “don’t have an obligation to participate” in enforcing copyright. They don’t — by design. Various U.S. laws — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so-called safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act – grant Internet companies the freedom to operate without being held responsible for knowing the legal pedigree of every piece of content on, or connected to, their sites. And for good reason.

Could Facebook have flourished with the expectation that Mark Zuckerburg and his Harvard dormmates were culpable for every link or video clip someone uploaded to their site? Not likely. So when Pallente testifies that “I believe that search engines should be fully within the reach of the attorney general,” we should hear the legislation for what it is: a revision of the notion that Internet companies have a duty to comply with the law, but not to act as its enforcers.

Washington is sometimes rightfully criticized for harboring some crazy ideas when it comes to the Internet. But the federal government has gotten some basic things very right, from funding the Internet in its early stages to having the wisdom to enshrine Section 230 and the safe harbors. It would be a shame to see Congress trash that legacy with a single bill.

Another concern is what SOPA would do for other countries that seek to shape the Internet as they see fit, China, of course, limits online discussion of democracy, often target the tools, like its homegrown version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, that foster those conversations. With SOPA, the United States would stand on shaky moral ground when it starts ordering search engines and ISPs to block and black out sites. As Secretary of State Clinton goes around the world promoting her “Internet Freedom Agenda,” she’ll be put in the position of distinguishing between the blocking of bootlegged movies (an infraction that China has shown it doesn’t care much about) and limiting democratic speech online.That’s a distinction very likely to get lost in translation.

And because the U.S. is doing it, there’s even more at stake. We might like to think of the Internet as an organic global medium, but someone has to make the trains run on time. That someone is ICANN, a California-based group that runs the Internet’s naming and numbering systems under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Not everyone in the world is pleased with the central role of the United States in the Internet’s governance, with several nations and groups wanting ICANN to hand over its authority to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. The U.S. government — and the countless computer scientists, engineers, and Internet policy advocates who live and work here — have been good stewards of the Internet so far. SOPA would throw that away with, potentially, little in return.

Opponents of SOPA are nervous is that the bill and its counterparts in the Senate have bipartisan support; SOPA’s 24 co-sponsors in the House include 14 Republicans and 10 Democrats. But the sheer extremism of the measure has made for strange bedfellows. In a tweet this week, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote, “Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet.” Her nemesis, Darrell Issa, Republican from California and chair of the House Oversight Committee, retweeted Pelosi’s note, appending commentary of his own: “If even we can agree … “

So why is Congress bothering? For one thing, Congress is eager to find real solutions for the struggling American economy. And for another, the music and movie industries have spent years and millions of dollars to sell the case that online copyright infringement is an albatross around the economy that the House and Senate can make go away. Right now. Study the test of SOPA for any length of time and with any real knowledge of how the Internet works, and you’ll realize it’s not that simple.

Still, there’s a mini-industry in Washington that consists of selling the idea that it is. Using data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Politico recently reported that the entertainment companies and other SOPA allies spent $280 million over 2010 and 2011 on lobbying. Google, eBay, Facebook and other big tech firms, by comparison, spent $30 million. We shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which SOPA is the natural product of a self-perpetuating system that demands some justification of why the MPAA et al are spending all those millions year after year.

Of course, at some point, even Washington has come to realize that there’s a lot more to the Internet economy than that described by the movie and music industries. Google is no slouch, and no member of Congress wants to be seen as standing in the way of the next Facebook. Andrew McDiarmid, an analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, which opposes the bill, said, “We were kind of encouraged by the hearing this week.” There were not public advocacy groups or Internet engineers testifying, and Google represented the sole opposition to the bill. “It was stacked,” he said.

“But at least five members of Congress raised concerns, and they asked more questions than I think we expected,” he said. ” There’s a fair bit of momentum on the bill, but people are really starting to take notice.”

: Nancy Scola is a New York City-based political writer whose work has appeared in the American Prospect, the Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Magazine and Salon. On Twitter, she's @nancyscola. More Nancy Scola

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Don’t ignore Facebook’s silly-sounding policies

A leaked manual reveals the shadowy and powerful role social media sites play in shaping public discourse

By Tarleton Gillespie

(Credit: Salon)

Topics:Facebook, Social Media, Internet Culture

A longer version of this piece appears on Culture Digitally.

Last week, Gawker received a curious document. Turned over by an aggrieved worker from the online freelance employment site oDesk, the document iterated, over the course of several pages and in unsettling detail, exactly what kinds of content should be deleted from the social networking site that had outsourced its content moderation to oDesk’s team. The social networking site, as it turned out, was Facebook.

The antiseptically titled “Abuse Standards 6.1: Operation Manual for Live Content Moderators” (along with an updated version 6.2 subsequently shared with Gawker, presumably by Facebook) is still available on Gawker. It represents the implementation of the Facebook’s Community Standards, which present the social media site’s priorities around acceptable content, but stay miles away from actually spelling them out. In the Community Standards, Facebook reminds users that “We have a strict ‘no nudity or pornography’ policy. Any content that is inappropriately sexual will be removed. Before posting questionable content, be mindful of the consequences for you and your environment.” But, an oDesk freelancer looking at hundreds of pieces of content every hour needs more specific instructions on what exactly is “inappropriately sexual” — such as removing “Any OBVIOUS sexual activity, even if naked parts are hidden from view by hands, clothes or other objects. Cartoons / art included. Foreplay allowed (Kissing, groping, etc.). even for same sex (man-man / woman-woman” (sic).

It’s tempting, and a little easy, to focus on the more bizarre edicts that Facebook offers here (“blatant depictions of camel toes” as well as “images of drunk or unconscious people, or sleeping people with things drawn on their faces” must be removed; pictures of marijuana are OK, as long as it’s not being offered for sale). But the absurdity here is really an artifact of having to draw this many lines in this much sand. Any time we play the game of determining what is and is not appropriate for public view, in advance and across an enormous and wide-ranging amount of content, the specifics are always going to sound sillier than the general guidelines. (It was not so long ago that “American Pie’s” filmmakers got their NC-17 rating knocked down to an R after cutting the scene in which the protagonist has sex with a pie from four thrusts to two.)

But the more important story concerns what this document reveals about the kind of content being posted to Facebook, the position in which Facebook and other content platforms find themselves, and the system they’ve put into place for enforcing the content moderation they now promise.

Facebook or no, it’s hard not to be struck by the depravity of some of the stuff that content moderators are reviewing. It’s a bit disingenuous of me to start with the camel toes, when what most of this document deals with is infinitely more reprehensible: child pornography, rape, bestiality, graphic obscenities, animal torture, racial and ethnic hatred, self-mutilation, suicide. There is something deeply unsettling about this document in the way it must, with all the delicacy of a badly written training manual, explain and sometimes show the kinds of things that fall into these categories.

This outpouring of obscenity is by no means caused by Facebook, and it is certainly reasonable for Facebook to take a position on the types of content it believes many of its users will find reprehensible. But that does not let Facebook off the hook for the kind of position it takes: not just where it draws the lines, but the fact that it draws lines at all, the kind of custodial role it takes on for itself, and the manner in which it goes about performing that role. We may not find it difficult to abhor child pornography or ethnic hatred, but we should not let that abhorrence obscure the fact that sites like Facebook are taking on this custodial role — and that while goofy frat pranks and cartoon poop may seem irrelevant, this is still public discourse. Facebook is now in the position of determining, or helping to determine, what is acceptable as public speech — on a site in which 800 million people across the globe talk to each other every day, about all manner of subjects.

This is not a new concern. The most prominent controversy has been about the removal of images of women breast-feeding, which has been a perennial thorn in Facebook’s side; but similar dust-ups have occurred around artistic nudity on Facebook, political caricature on Apple’s iPhone, gay-themed books on Amazon, and fundamentalist Islamic videos on YouTube. The leaked document, while listing all the things that should be removed, is marked with the residue of these past controversies. It clarifies the breast-feeding rule somewhat, by prohibiting “Breastfeeding photos showing other nudity, or nipple clearly exposed.” Any commentary that denies the existence of the Holocaust must be escalated for further review, not surprising after years of criticism. Concerns for cyber-bullying, which have been taken up so vehemently over the last two years, appear repeatedly in the manual. And under the heading “international compliance” are a number of decidedly specific prohibitions, most involving Turkey’s objection to their Kurdish separatist movement, including prohibitions on maps of Kurdistan, images of the Turkish flag being burned, and any support for PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party) or their imprisoned founder Abdullah Ocalan.

Facebook and its removal policies, and other major content platforms and their policies, are the new terrain for long-standing debates about the content and character of public discourse. That images of women breast-feeding have proven a controversial policy for Facebook should not be surprising, since the issue of women breast-feeding in public remains a contested cultural sore spot. That our dilemmas about terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, so heightened over the last decade, should erupt here too is also not surprising. The dilemmas these sites face can be seen as a barometer of our society’s pressing concerns about public discourse more broadly: how much is too much; where are the lines drawn and who has the right to draw them; how do we balance freedom of speech with the values of the community, with the safety of individuals, with the aspirations of art and the wants of commerce.

But a barometer simply measures where there is pressure. When Facebook steps into these controversial issues, decides to authorize itself as custodian of content that some of its users find egregious, establishes both general guidelines and precise instructions for removing that content, and then does so, it is not merely responding to cultural pressures, it is intervening in them, reinforcing the very distinctions it applies. Whether breast-feeding is made more visible or less, whether Holocaust deniers can use this social network to make their case or not, whether sexual fetishes can or cannot be depicted, matters for the acceptability or marginalization of these topics. If, as is the case here, there are “no exceptions for news or awareness-related content” to the rules against graphic imagery and speech, well, that’s a very different decision, with different public ramifications, than if news and public service did enjoy such an exception.

But the most intriguing revelation here may not be the rules, but how the process of moderating content is handled. Sites like Facebook have been relatively circumspect about how they manage this task: They generally do not want to draw attention to the presence of so much obscene content on their sites, or that they regularly engage in “censorship” to deal with it. So the process by which content is assessed and moderated is also opaque. This little document brings into focus a complex chain of people and activities required for Facebook to play custodian.

The moderator using this leaked manual would be looking at content already reported or “flagged” by a Facebook user. The moderator would either “confirm” the report (thereby deleting the content), “unconfirm” it (the content stays) or “escalate” it, which moves it to Facebook for further or heightened review. Facebook has dozens of its own employees playing much the same role; contracting out to oDesk freelancers, and to companies like Caleris and Telecommunications On Demand, serves as merely a first pass. Facebook also acknowledges that it looks proactively at content that has not yet been reported by users (unlike sites like YouTube that claim to wait for their users to flag before they weigh in). Within Facebook, there is not only a layer of employees looking at content much as the oDesk workers do, but also a team charged with discussing truly gray area cases, empowered both to remove content and to revise the rules themselves.

At each level, we might want to ask: What kind of content gets reported, confirmed and escalated? How are the criteria for judging determined? Who is empowered to rethink these criteria? How are general guidelines translated into specific rules, and how well do these rules fit the content being uploaded day in and day out? How do those involved, from the policy setter down to the freelance clickworker, manage the tension between the rules handed to them and their own moral compass? What kind of contextual and background knowledge is necessary to make informed decisions, and how is the context retained or lost as the reported content passes from point to point along the chain? What kind of valuable speech gets caught in this net? What never gets posted at all, that perhaps should?

Keeping our Facebook streets clean is a monumental task, involving multiple teams of people, flipping through countless photos and comments, making quick judgments, based on regularly changing proscriptions translated from vague guidelines, in the face of an ever-changing, global, highly contested, and relentless flood of public expression. And this happens at every site, though implemented in different ways. Content moderation is one of those undertakings that, from one vantage point, we might say it’s amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. But from another vantage point, we should see that we are playing a dangerous game: the private determination of the appropriate boundaries of public speech. That’s a whole lot of cultural power, in the hands of a select few who have a lot of skin in the game, and it’s being done in an oblique way that makes it difficult for anyone else to inspect or challenge. As users, we certainly cannot allow ourselves to remain naive, believing that the search engine shows all relevant results, the social networking site welcomes all posts, the video platform merely hosts what users generate. Our information landscape is a curated one. What is important, then, is that we understand the ways in which it is curated, by whom and to what ends, and engage in a sober, public conversation about the kind of public discourse we want and need, and how we’re willing to get it.

: Tarleton Gillespie is a professor of Communication and Information Science at Cornell University. He is the author of "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture" and is writing a new book on how private online media platforms curate public discourse. He co-curates the blog Culture Digitally. More Tarleton Gillespie

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Protest drags down Europe’s SOPA

Hollywood heads for another defeat as the online world rejects an anti-counterfeiting proposal

By Nancy Scola

Internet activists protest against the international copyright agreement ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, in front of the European Parliament office in Warsaw, Poland

Internet activists protest against the international copyright agreement knon as ACTA, (Credit: AP)

Topics:Internet Culture, Stop Online Piracy Act, Editor's Picks

“I will not take part in this masquerade,” wrote the European Union’s special rapporteur for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, as he tendered his resignation last month. Since then, opposition to the international pact on so-called intellectual property has swelled. The popular fervor that thwarted the Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States has gone global.

Thousands marched in the streets of Europe last weekend, with protests reported in Budapest, Paris, Prague, Vilnius, Transylvania and beyond. Bulgaria has pulled out of the process of signing ACTA, as the agreement is known. Latvia has called for greater consultation. Poland has suspended its involvement. And Germany is holding off, as are the Czech and Slovak governments. Hollywood had expected a neat and tidy ending to the years-long negotiation of a new global copyright regime. What it has gotten is something as complex as a Fellini film.

How did we get here? In 2007, the United States, along with Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Korea and the 27 EU member countries began, in near total secret, to work out a policy on piracy and bootlegging that would stand separate from existing international trade bodies. The hope was to synchronize enforcement against counterfeit goods, from knockoff Viagra to black-market electronics to faux Nike sneakers.

But as the world has gotten a peek at ACTA over the years, it’s how the agreement would govern the Internet that has gotten the most attention. The agreement has raised concerns that travelers will have their laptops and MP3 players searched at border crossings for illicit copies of movies or music, or that Internet service providers will be forced to crack down on customers suspected of using their bandwidth to trade files.

“I don’t know where it comes from and how it originated,” said Lithuania’s justice minister, “but I don’t like that this treaty was signed skillfully avoiding discussions in the European Union and Lithuania.”

In real part, where it has come from is Hollywood, as well as the movie industry’s baby brother, the U.S. recording industry. Over the years, those industries have pursued two tactics in their copyright crackdown, one local, one global. Domestically, the Motion Picture Association of America has pushed SOPA and its companion, the Protect IP Act. Globally, there is ACTA. That international agreement could get done on the world stage not only what MPAA has achieved in Washington, but some of what it hasn’t been able to push through in the United States

Both at home and abroad, critics have argued that Hollywood’s vision of an Internet — one where it is empowered to hunt down violators — cares far more about protecting copyright than it does about protecting the public’s ability to freely associate and communicate online. But as unsettling as that might sound to those of us in the United States, it can be downright terrifying in places where fears of totalitarianism and surveillance are fresh and real. Culture doesn’t always translate, on-screen or off. Secretive cross-border agreements hit the ear differently in Vilnius, or Berlin, or Warsaw. Add to that the fact that the Internet is seen as a refuge, a place where the people stand a chance of countering the shadowy ways of government, and the resistance to ACTA we’re seeing in Europe isn’t surprising.

ACTA’s negotiators, for their part, reject the way that the agreement has been framed. Existing trade agreements like the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement pre-date the Internet, they point out. Karel De Gucht, the European Commissioner for Trade, insists that ACTA’s real target is “large-scale illegal activity, often pursued by criminal organizations.”

But, as with SOPA and PIPA, the issue here isn’t just the substance of the policy. It’s who was writing it, and how they were doing it. For a long while, the little that was known about the drafting process came through a WikiLeaks leak. In that vacuum of information, the focus turned to what looked for all the world like Hollywood’s hijacking of what may well be a necessary global conversation about counterfeit goods.

“Unfortunately for these guys,” wrote Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld, “whenever there is an international trade agreement negotiation, Hollywood jumps in, takes over, and starts driving the crazy train off a cliff by demanding all kinds of nonesense [sic] in the name of ‘stopping piracy.’”

If ACTA is SOPA and PIPA writ international (and it is, in spirit if not in enforcement mechanisms), then what is fascinating to notice here is how the catalyzed reaction against ACTA across Europe mirrored that inter-government agreement: It has been a networked response. Surely, there have been major players. The hacker collective Anonymous has played a role. So has the Pirate Party, a tech-minded political party that started in Sweden and has spread across Europe. But there are millions more individuals who have made themselves heard. Anti-ACTA sentiment has spread nearly virally across the continent.

The Internet is beginning to level the political playing field. The Motion Picture Association of America boasts offices in 30 countries around the globe. That has long been to its considerable advantage. But, as with SOPA and PIPA, Hollywood’s political arm is finding that the kids and not-so-young people rallying online and in the streets are proving to be, in the aggregate, at least, formidable foes.

And each of those rallies, each public demonstration — in Budapest or Prague or New York City – over a copyright bill makes it harder to believe Hollywood’s long-told tale: that the only ones who don’t want their copyright regime are hardcore digital pirates driven by a desire to get music and movies for free. It’s getting difficult to ignore the fact that this particular story might be a little more complicated than that. There’s more to the free flow of online information than piracy. That much this winter’s wired political protests have made plain.

: Nancy Scola is a New York City-based political writer whose work has appeared in the American Prospect, the Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Magazine and Salon. On Twitter, she's @nancyscola. More Nancy Scola

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Someone’s got compromising pictures of me

I trusted someone I shouldn't have, and now I'm afraid these pix will show up on the Net

By Cary Tennis

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Topics:Since You Asked, anxiety, Internet Culture

Dear Cary,

A while back, I trusted someone I shouldn’t have. I was dumb and in a bad place. This person was not who they said they were, and their intentions were not what they said they were.

They got photos of me that I wish they hadn’t. Embarrassing ones. Nothing illegal. You know what I’m talking about.

After that, I realized they weren’t who they said they were, and I cut contact. I haven’t heard from them since. But they have my photos.

And now I sit and wait for these photos to show up somewhere. It’s been about 18 months. Nothing has shown up. I regularly Google my name and the email address I was using at the time, as well as the other person’s “name.” Nothing.

I don’t know for sure that these photos were intended for public viewing, but it’s easy to imagine that they would end up that way. They might be there, sitting on some website, waiting to be discovered. Or they might not be. I don’t know. I never will.

Now I wonder, how am I to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that these photos could, at any time, turn up? How can I have this hanging over my head, the idea that in a year’s time, 10 years’ time, 40 years’ time, these photos will turn up? Obviously there’s nothing I can do. I can’t stop it if it’s going to happen, but how do I live with the anxiety that they could turn up, and ruin a job, a relationship, a family life? I also have paranoid fantasies about the future of the Internet, where everything is easily retrievable, where facial recognition snaps to life and brings up every record from every corner of the Internet of a person and their past.

I wonder, is this the one stupid mistake I made that will come back to tear apart everything?

It’s affected my life. I don’t feel safe. My normal high anxiety levels are higher. I used to want to achieve in an area of public visibility, and was making some good roads to becoming known in certain areas. I’ve now retracted, feeling certain that the moment I achieve any sort of profile, my past — this one or two stupid weeks of bad decisions — will come and get me. Similarly, when I meet people who I think I could have a relationship with, I think “What if, somewhere down the track, they found out? They saw?” So, again, I retract.

That’s it. I know that in a way it’s an unsolvable problem. I also know that it’s at least partially fed by my own highly sensitive neuroses, and partially fed by fact. I can’t tell how much of each equals a reasonable amount.

If you’ve got any answers for me at all, any way to manage this without tipping over the edge, I’d certainly appreciate them.

Shouldn’t Have Said Cheese

Dear Shouldn’t Have Said Cheese,

Thank you for confiding in me. I’m grateful for the courage you have shown in sharing your story. The fact that you were able to confide in me shows that you still trust some people.

Truly, it is difficult to live in a world where some people cannot be trusted. Yet we must live in that world. We cannot eliminate all those who might at some point not be trustworthy. We cannot always know what people are thinking. Even the smartest of us can be deceived. There is no shame in that.

I hope you will continue to show your trust, and take my advice and reach out again, to get some help with your anxiety. Now is a good time to do so, because anxiety can get worse as you go along. If you reach out now for help managing and minimizing your anxiety, the opposite will happen: You will gradually find ways to form trusting and strong relationships, which will make you feel more secure in the world, and you will learn ways to cope with these fears about the future that come up from time to time.

Here is a site provided by the Anxiety Disorders Association of America that will help you find a therapist to talk to about this and other concerns you may have. (Please note that if you do not want to provide your address, you can leave those fields blank and search simply by state or, if you are in Canada, by province. Also note that the First Name and Last Name fields are for the name of a therapist, if you know of one you want to search for.)

This one incident has left you anxious, and it is important not to let that anxiety grow. You also mention feelings of paranoia and a desire not to tip over the edge. So I suggest you find a therapist to work with now, before you have to suffer more worry and anxiety. This situation can be resolved. If you get help for this now, I think you will be able to look back on this and see that it turned out OK. You will feel stronger and optimistic about the future.

I have great faith in the ability of trained psychotherapists and psychiatrists to help us overcome problems of anxiety and paranoia. I myself have been told by a Ph.D. psychologist that I have a tendency toward anxiety, and I have been helped by my many conversations with him.

So I know from personal experience that it is possible to be helped in situations like this. But it is important to act.

So find someone to talk to about this and commit to seeing that person regularly for a while. After a bond of trust develops, you will be amazed at how relieved you feel.

Cary Tennis is Salon's advice columnist. His latest book is "Citizens of the Dream: Advice on Writing, Painting, Playing, Acting and Being." He leads writing workshops and creative getaways, and occasionally tweets and bellows as @carytennis on Twitter.

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A new breed of porn CEO — female

Lux Alptraum, the new head of Fleshbot, embodies how the Internet is changing the face of the adult industry

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: Adam Courtney)

Topics:Sex, Internet Culture

Lux Alptraum is not your stereotypical adult-industry executive: She’s young, female, queer, Ivy-educated and based in New York. As the newly minted CEO of the porn blog Fleshbot, which until recently was part of the Gawker Media empire, Alptraum is proof of how the Internet is changing the face of the adult business.

She took “a long and winding road” to this point. In college at Columbia, she discovered the online amateur porn scene, which was exploding at the time. “There were a lot of different people doing things that were really fascinating and intriguing and not standard porn,” she says. Alptraum started modeling and doing cam shows for a site that specialized in “nerdy girls,” but after a year she quit and started her own site, That Strange Girl.

A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.

The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.

So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”

Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”

Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.

Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”

Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”

The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”

But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”

It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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The Internet makes magic disappear

YouTube has killed the magician's art, and threatens the stores where tricks have been passed down for generations

By Santiago Wills

(Credit: Wallenrock and Maxx-Studio via Shutterstock/Salon)

Topics:Internet Culture, Art in Crisis, Editor's Picks

In 1998, my father riffled a red deck of playing cards while we attended a family reunion on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia. He asked me to pick one, and I told him to stop when his fingers reached the middle of the pack. As he closed his eyes, I pulled out the ace of hearts and placed it near the end. He ordered me to think hard about my random selection, and then pretended to write something on the inside of his left arm.

“Concentrate,” he said while I watched him roll up his sleeves. “This won’t work unless you focus on your card.”

He pretended to be lost. He looked around, shook his head and grabbed a newspaper by a fireplace. After selecting a faded page, he set it on fire, gathered the gray-white ashes and gently spread them over his slightly tanned arm. Two dark figures slowly appeared on his grayish skin: “A♥.”

I was fascinated. It wasn’t the first trick my dad had performed for me — since I was 8, coins had frequently come out of my “dirty ears” and ropes had disentangled themselves from impossible knots — but this was certainly the first one that captivated me. I begged him to tell me how he had done it. Like a parrot, he repeated over and over again a conversation-ending mantra that I would soon adopt. “A magician never reveals his secrets,” he stated sternly. Of course, that argument lacked prescriptive force for a 10-year-old, and several days of relentless questioning later, he finally caved in. He made me quite aware, however, that he wasn’t going to teach how me to do it.

Soon after, my father drove me to the School of Magical Arts of Bogota, an old, spacious edifice that housed a magic school, a theater and a remarkable shop crammed with variegated paper flowers, disappearing wands, jumbo decks, vintage posters and rabbit-size contraptions. There, he said, I would finally learn the secret.

- – - – - -

Since the late 19th century, when two German brothers named Francis and Antonio Martinka opened a conjuring store in New York, brick-and-mortar magic shops have played a central role in America’s magical culture. For more than a hundred years, these often small, dark chambers have been a gathering place where traveling illusionists and celebrated performers like Houdini, Thurston and Kellar discussed their latest creations, shielded from the pestering presence of hobbyists and the general public. More important, up until a decade ago, they were the only places where magicians could teach eager teenagers like myself the right methods to produce ashen apparitions and the more complicated tricks that inevitably follow.

But then the Internet broke that monopoly. Today, any 10-year-old kid can type “magic tricks” into Google and gain access either via YouTube or other websites to the biggest trade secrets in a matter of minutes. He can watch a video or buy an expensive apparatus without leaving his house, seeing a live demonstration or talking to another human being.

As a result, magic stores are slowly vanishing across America. With their gradual disappearance, as Jamy Ian Swiss — a leading card-expert and magic historian recognized for his brilliant technique and for his outspoken column in Genii, a conjuring magazine — has argued, one of the foundations of this ancient art form is disappearing.

“Magic has always depended on the control of information,” Swiss told me in an interview. “When I was young, you had to hang around a magic shop, and learn to ask, and ask politely. You would approach a guy and he would tell you, ‘Well, show me what you are working on, kid,’ and you’d show him. And then he might say, ‘Let me help you out with that,’ or ‘Let me show you something different than what you asked.’

“The biggest problem with DVD and YouTube exposure is that it has damaged the skill of learning through asking, and it has created the mistaken assumption, perhaps, that all knowledge and all wisdom is available to buy,” he said. “And there’s so much difference between those two acts, because asking involves a human experience, while buying is just sitting in your coach and passively absorbing countless secrets that you think constitute magic.”

In New York, the Yellow Pages listed 16 magic shops in 1960 but just three by 2003. Now there are only two, Fantasma and Tannen’s Magic, says George Schindler, the dean of the Society of American Magicians.

Fantasma and Tannen’s are lingering throwbacks where young magicians can still learn secrets directly from their elders, sidestepping DVDs and videos from online sites. They are sanctuaries where awkward 10-, 14- and 20-year-olds can meet and talk to each other and to older magicians without fearing ridicule or censorship. They are the last place where kids who mask their timidity through magic can find someone to help them overcome the challenges of art and life.

- – - – - -

On a recent visit to Fantasma, “Magic Mo,” a laconic 14-year-old who wouldn’t part with his real name, fanned the cards while he waited for his mentor. As he opened and closed a red-backed deck, Mo watched David Roth, a world-renowned sleight-of-hand artist, perform for an English couple.

After divining several cards and correctly naming a random word a woman mentally chose from a book, Roth walked to the cashier and added up the cost of tricks the couple had bought for their magic-obsessed godson. The woman waved as she disappeared through the main door. Roth closed the register with a sigh and returned to check on Mo.

With a soft and at times faltering voice, the teenager showed him a card-control technique he was working on. Roth corrected him and urged him to do it again.

“Don’t practice in front of the mirror,” he told him. “You get used to blinking when you are doing a pass, which is not good. Video is better. But then again, you should do it in front of your friends here. The camera doesn’t think.”

Roth stood behind a display case filled with DVDs, multicolored decks of cards and several types of coins in a 3,500-square-foot exhibition room on the corner of 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. (Fantasma serves as a store and display room for one of the world’s leading magic manufacturers, according to Roger Dreyer, one of the owners.) Directly in front of him, just behind a caged pet rabbit named Rambo, lies a collection of original Houdini memorabilia, which includes handcuffs, locks, books and black-and-white photographs. A couple of bookshelves line a part of two walls to the left of the exhibition, near a table with four seats that are occasionally occupied by amateur and professional magicians spreading blue-backed Bicycle decks over a blood-red cloth lined by black felt.

“Magic shops are disappearing because of the Internet,” Roth said during one of my visits while he extended his calloused hands toward the roof. “This place is an oddity.”

He works at Fanstasma twice a week, demonstrating tricks to potential customers and holding court over the enthusiasts who come by to talk to him or to show him something they’ve developed. Roth, 69, has short white hair that contrasts with his rosy face.

As most magicians will tell you, Roth is a legend within the guild. An expert coin manipulator, he was mentored by Dai Vernon, a man revered by close-up magicians throughout the 20th century. Vernon was a Canadian sleight-of-hand artist known as “The Professor” who revolutionized card magic by developing techniques he learned from gamblers all around the country. He eventually adopted Roth as a protégé from the 1970s to the 1990s — the final years of his life — in the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

Within the walls of the Hollywood private club of the Academy of Magical Arts, Vernon advised Roth on the importance of practice and highlighted the beauty of a flawless technique in which all movements seemed natural.

“There are terrible magicians online that do tricks as if they had just learned them in the schoolyard,” Roth told me when I asked him about people who posted magic videos on YouTube. “They don’t practice. They see something and think they can do it immediately.”

Lack of practice is a constant complaint. You hear it even from amateur magicians like Uriel Nashofer, 20, a New Jersey native now studying in Missouri who likes to hang out at Fantasma whenever he comes home.

“Kids don’t read books anymore. They just watch DVDs or download effects from websites like Penguin and Theory11. The problem is they don’t think about the presentation,” he said after showing me a series of card tricks. “The effects I just did, for example, it took me nearly eight months of practice to master.”

- – - – - -

Unlike Fantasma, Tannen’s Magic doesn’t sell toys, only items used by professionals. The store is located in the sixth floor of an unremarkable building near Herald Square. Three black-and-white rabbit silhouettes decorate a blank wall in the corridor that leads to the shop. The dimly lit quarters house six glass counters and several floor-to-roof shelves covered with an assortment of colorful cylindrical gimmicks, colossal dice, papier-mâché flora and countless DVDs and special kinds of playing cards inside transparent plastic bags.

Tannen’s moved its catalog online a couple of years ago, and now sales are split evenly between the shadowy locale on West 34th Street and its own website, according to Adam Blumenthal, 27, the young Broadway light-designer and magician who owns the place. (Balay calculated that in Fantasma 70 percent of the sales still took place in the shop.) The store, nevertheless, still attracts a loyal throng of kids, especially over the weekend.

On a Saturday afternoon, four teenagers and a 25-year-old stand-up comedian were practicing flourishes, spreading fans, cutting the deck in three smooth movements and making cards fly from one hand to the other, and showing each other new tricks on a table in the center of the room. After watching them for a while, I joined them and asked how they thought the Internet was affecting magic.

“I started by learning from YouTube and it messed up all my future performance,” Vlad Verba, 14, said while he kept on cutting a deck in his hand. “I’m a righty, so I have to hold the deck in my left hand. I didn’t know that and I learned all the sleights using the wrong hand. I had to start all over after I came here.”

Harrison Greenbaum, a stand-up comedian, magician and counselor at Magic Camp — an event that Tannen’s organizes each year in which magicians from all around the country fly to Philadelphia to mentor and teach kids about performance and the psychology of the art — emphasized the social aspect of the store.

“In a brick-and-mortar magic shop there is a sense of community,” he said. “You get to know other people and you have somebody who’s an expert, who can help you with specifics that you don’t know about. You meet incredible magicians and you are able to walk up to them and show them what you can do, so that they’ll critique you and give you some tips.”

For Danny Braff, 15, visiting Tannen’s at least once a week offered a related advantage. “I met my best friend here,” he told me. “He’s a magician named Ruben Moreland and he’s helped me a lot with everything. I wouldn’t be nearly as good as I am if it wasn’t for him.”

The kids talked about Magic Camp and Harrison joked about how videos would inevitably fall short when answering important questions.

“What do you do if the bar mitzvah boy starts crying?” he asked, shrugging. “What do you do if your pants rip during a show? That happened to me once, you know.”

Everyone laughed and after a long silence, Joshua Kurzbam, 20, a sinewy teenager with receding black hair who sat next to Braff, looked at me, as if asking for permission to speak. “Magic allows us to be social,” he said. “It gives us an excuse to talk to people.”

Two of his companions lowered their eyes and nodded. They kept on talking until it was closing time, ceaselessly shuffling the packs of playing cards in their hands.

- – - – - -

The online videos often resemble movie trailers. They range from around 45 seconds to almost two minutes, featuring cyan- or red-saturated images and original short-lived soundtracks. Typically, they start with the logo of the website or a fading title over dark backgrounds, and then feature fast, short frames in which viewers can catch a glimpse of the effects being sold.

There are now dozens of Internet-based companies that sell products online. Two of the biggest, as kids in shops will tell you, are Penguin Magic and Theory11. Penguin strives to project a youthful image by using cartoons and a bright color interface, while Theory11 reinforces the aura of mystery cultivated in its videos by using black and gray tones.

Penguin started in 2002 and has grown ever since to become one of the most visited magic sites. One of the company’s main strengths is the sheer amount and variety of effects that it sells. The same is true of Theory11, a website founded in 2007 by 11 magic industry insiders, which last year launched “The Wire,” a global marketplace that allows magicians to directly publish their creations online.

The philosophy behind both ventures was to offer their clients an ever-increasing inventory capable of fulfilling any kind of style or concentration.

“The idea was to start a store where magicians could actually see a demo of every trick in the shop,” Acar Altinsel, a co-founder of Penguin, wrote me in an email. “Walk into most magic shops and the magician behind the counter can only perform a handful of what you see. This was constantly disappointing for me as a kid.”

Videos are supposed to solve that problem, according to Altinsel. “A ‘good’ magic DVD will get as much into presentation as an in-person lecture or book. Further, online video chat ‘sessioning’ has put magicians in an even better position to get mentoring and correction,” he wrote.

Most professional conjurers would disagree. The difference between a live performance or even a live chat and an online interaction is qualitative. As any music lover will testify, there are essential differences between watching a live video of a concert and actually attending the concert. The feeling and the power of the experience are heightened by the use of all the other senses, by the crowd’s feelings and the immediate surroundings. The statement is equally valid for couples who try to rekindle their passion via Skype or for any other art-form that thrives on human responsiveness.

Eric DeCamps, a magician from Forest Hills who was the second man in 107 years to receive the Gold Medal of Excellence for Close Up Magic of the Society of American Magicians, put it in somewhat similar terms in a recent conversation.

“Magic is a performing art,” he said, “and while it is interesting and fun to solve magic problems on your own, the problem doesn’t take full life until you perform in front of a live audience. I can’t explain the feeling I get when you are in front of that audience and you communicate and you almost become one consciousness; I mean, you almost know what they are thinking and there’s a level of communication that is indescribable.”

- – - – - -

As Jamy Swiss points out, magic is timeless, perhaps the spawn of a single moment of ingenious play. “It is likely that even in ancient times someone in a cave took a stone and pretended to put it in one hand while keeping it in the other, and magic was born,” he said.

Nevertheless, just one trick, as my father knew, was worthless. He was aware that even though the ash effect I coveted was relatively simple, to perform it properly I would first have to learn to perfection certain card techniques. He also knew I rarely spoke to other people. He knew I would rather hide behind a book than talk to a classmate or participate in a social event that involved more than two people. I presume that in part that was why he decided that a brick and mortar magic shop was the only place where I would be able to acquire the skills I craved.

The two-story house was a gathering place for Colombian magicians and for quiet, awkward kids like myself. While dozens of doves cooed from cages in the second floor, a group of five teenagers would sit around a green felt table and watch Richard Sarmiento, the stout, bearded magician who ran the school, execute basic sleight-of-hand techniques twice a week. With exacting detail, Sarmiento would explain under a weak yellow light the essential hand movements, and correct our own poor attempts to mirror him, much like Roth had done with Mo in Fantasma.

We would rarely ask questions or talk to each other. We stifled our wavering voices as we concentrated on how to palm a coin or divine a card. As we got better, Sarmiento taught us more complicated effects and pressed us to speak. We had to shed our shared shyness, he said. Our low voices would not do, for it was important to control the stage, to act naturally while performing passes or using misdirection in front of a live audience.

After a year of study, my colleagues and I staged an evening of magic in the theater. I closed my act by inviting a woman from the audience to choose a card. I joked with her and the audience laughed while I grabbed a lighter from a top hat. I asked her to concentrate on her selection and pretended to write something with an imaginary pen on a silver tray, which I held over the inside of my left arm.

I burned a newspaper over the tray and triumphantly showed the audience the blackened silver. A couple of people clapped even though the darkened metal had no particular shape. After feigning panic for a couple of seconds, I spread the black ashes over my left arm while Sarmiento and my father watched me. A “2♥” appeared in bold letters on my skin.