Quote of the Day
Every pattern is an obstacle to new patterns, to the extent that the first pattern is inflexible…To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself. In order that the originality of the idealist whose dreams transcend his century may find expression, it is necessary that the originality of the criminal, who is below the level of his time, shall also be possible. One does not occur without the other.
The Uber Achievers
In 1997, the computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, best known as the creator of Pascal, conducted a fascinating interview with the magazine Software Development, which I’ve quoted here before. When asked if it would be better to design programming languages with “human issues” in mind, Wirth replied:
Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings. It is no secret that human beings suffer from imperfection, limited reliability, and impatience—among other things. Add to it that they have become demanding, which leads to the request for rapid, high performance in return for the requested high salaries. Work under constant time pressure, however, results in unsatisfactory, faulty products.
When I read this quotation now, I think of Uber. As a recent story by Caroline O’Donovan and Priya Anand of Buzzfeed makes clear, the company that seems to have alienated just about everyone in the world didn’t draw the line at its own staff: “Working seven days a week, sometimes until 1 or 2 a.m., was considered normal, said one employee. Another recalled her manager telling her that spending seventy to eighty hours a week in the office was simply ‘how Uber works.’ Someone else recalled working eighty to one hundred hours a week.” One engineer, who is now in therapy, recalled: “It’s pretty clear that giving that much of yourself to any one thing is not healthy. There were days where I’d wake up, shower, go to work, work until midnight or so, get a free ride home, sleep six hours, and go back to work. And I’d do that for a whole week.”
“I feel so broken and dead,” one employee concluded. But while Uber’s internal culture was undoubtedly bad for morale, it might seem hard at first to make the case that the result was an “unsatisfactory, faulty” product. As a source quoted in the article notes, stress at the company led to occasional errors: “If you’ve been woken up at 3 a.m. for the last five days, and you’re only sleeping three to four hours a day, and you make a mistake, how much at fault are you, really?” Yet the Uber app itself is undeniably elegant and reliable, and the service that it provided is astonishingly useful—if it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about it now. When we look at what else Wirth says, though, the picture becomes more complicated. All italics in the following are mine:
Generally, the hope is that corrections will not only be easy, because software is immaterial, but that the customers will be willing to share the cost. We know of much better ways to design software than is common practice, but they are rarely followed. I know of a particular, very large software producer that explicitly assumes that design takes twenty percent of developers’ time, and debugging takes eighty percent. Although internal advocates of an eighty percent design time versus twenty percent debugging time have not only proven that their ratio is realistic, but also that it would improve the company’s tarnished image. Why, then, is the twenty-percent design time approach preferred? Because with twenty-percent design time your product is on the market earlier than that of a competitor consuming eighty-percent design time. And surveys show that the customer at large considers a shaky but early product as more attractive than a later product, even if it is stable and mature.
This description applies perfectly to Uber, as long as we remember that its “product” isn’t bounded by its app alone, but extends to its impact on drivers, employees, competitors, and the larger community in which it exists—or what an economist would call its externalities. Taken as a closed system, the Uber experience is perfect, but only because it pushes its problems outside the bounds of the ride itself. When you look at the long list of individuals and groups that its policies have harmed, you discern the outlines of its true product, which can be described as the system of interactions between the Uber app and the world. You could say this of most kinds of software, but it’s particularly stark for a service that is tied to the problem of physically moving its customers from one point to another on the earth’s surface. By that standard, “shaky but early” describes Uber beautifully. It certainly isn’t “stable and mature.” The company expanded to monstrous proportions before basic logistical, political, and legal matters had been resolved, and it acted as if it could simply bull its way through any obstacles. (Its core values, let’s not forget, included “stepping on toes” and “principled confrontation.”) Up to a point, it worked, but something had to give, and economic logic dictated that the stress fall on the human factor, which was presumably resilient enough to absorb punishment from the design and technology sides. One of the most striking quotes in the Buzzfeed article comes from Uber’s chief human resources officer: “Many employees are very tired from working very, very hard as the company grew. Resources were tight and the growth was such that we could never hire sufficiently, quickly enough, in order to keep up with the growth.” To assert that “resources were tight” at the most valuable startup on the planet seems like a contradiction in terms, and it would be more accurate to say that Uber decided to channel massive amounts of capital in certain directions while neglecting those that it cynically thought could take it.
But it was also right, until it wasn’t. Human beings are extraordinarily resilient, as long as you can convince them to push themselves past the limits of their ability, or at least to do work at rates that you can afford. In the end, they burn out, but there are ways to postpone that moment or render it irrelevant. When it came to its drivers, Uber benefited from a huge pool of potential contractors, which made turnover a statistical, rather than an individual, problem. With its corporate staff and engineers, there was always the power of money, in the form of equity in the company, to persuade people to stay long past the point where they would have otherwise quit. The firm gambled that it would lure in plenty of qualified hires willing to trade away their twenties for the possibility of future wealth, and it did. (As the Buzzfeed article reveals, Uber seems to have approached compensation for its contractors and employees in basically the same way: “Uber acknowledges that it pays less than some of its top competitors for talent…The Information reported that Uber uses an algorithm to estimate the lowest possible compensation employees will take in order to keep labor costs down.”) When the whole system finally failed, it collapsed spectacularly, and it might help to think of Uber’s implosion, which unfolded over less than six months, as a software crash, with bugs that were ignored or patched cascading in a chain reaction that brings down the entire program. And the underlying factor wasn’t just a poisonous corporate culture or the personality of its founder, but the sensibility that Wirth identified two decades ago, as a company rushed to get a flawed idea to market on the assumption that consumers—or society as a whole—would bear the costs of correcting it. As Wirth asks: “Who is to blame for this state of affairs? The programmer turned hacker; the manager under time pressure; the business man compelled to extol profit wherever possible; or the customer believing in promised miracles?”
Quote of the Day
Your field is bounded where you want it to be.
Frogs for snakes
If you’re the sort of person who can’t turn away from a show business scandal with leaked memos, insider anecdotes, and accusations of bad conduct on both sides, the last two weeks have offered a pair of weirdly similar cases. The first involves Frank Darabont, the former showrunner of The Walking Dead, who was fired during the show’s second season and is now suing the network for a share of profits from the most popular series in the history of cable television. In response, AMC released a selection of Darabont’s emails intended to demonstrate that his firing was justified, and it makes for queasily riveting reading. Some are so profane that I don’t feel comfortable quoting them here, but this one gives you a sense of the tone:
If it were up to me, I’d have not only fired [these two writers] when they handed me the worst episode three script imaginable, I’d have hunted them down and f—ing killed them with a brick, then gone and burned down their homes. I haven’t even spoken to those worthless talentless hack sons-of-bitches since their third draft was phoned in after five months of all their big talk and promises that they’d dig deep and have my back covered…Calling their [script] “phoned-in” would be vastly overstating, because they were too busy wasting my time and your money to bother picking the damn phone up. Those f—ing overpaid con artists.
In an affidavit, Darabont attempted to justify his words: “Each of these emails must be considered in context. They were sent during an intense and stressful two-year period of work during which I was fighting like a mother lion to protect the show from harm…Each of these emails was sent because a ‘professional’ showed up whose laziness, indifference, or incompetence threatened to sink the ship. My tone was the result of the stress and magnitude of this extraordinary crisis. The language and hyperbole of my emails were harsh, but so were the circumstances.”
Frankly, I don’t find this quite as convincing as the third act of The Shawshank Redemption. As it happened, the Darabont emails were released a few days before a similar dispute engulfed Steve Whitmire, the puppeteer who had been performing Kermit the Frog since the death of Jim Henson. After the news broke last week that Whitmire had been fired, accounts soon emerged of his behavior that strikingly echoed the situation with Darabont: “He’d send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director,” Brian Henson told the New York Times. Whitmire has disputed the characterization: “Nobody was yelling and screaming or using inappropriate language or typing in capitals. It was strictly that I was sending detailed notes. I don’t feel that I was, in any way, disrespectful by doing that.” And his defense, like Darabont’s, stems from what he frames as a sense of protectiveness toward the show and its characters. Of a plot point involving Kermit and his nephew Robin on the defunct series The Muppets, Whitmire said to the Hollywood Reporter:
I don’t think Kermit would lie to him. I think that as Robin came to Kermit, he would say “Things happen, people go their separate ways, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about you.” Kermit is too compassionate to lie to him to spare his feelings…We have been doing these characters for a long, long time and we know them better than anybody. I thought I was aiding to keep it on track, and I think a big reason why the show was canceled…was because that didn’t happen. I am not saying my notes would have saved it, but I think had they listened more to all of the performers, it would have made a really big difference.
Unfortunately, the case of Whitmire, like that of Darabont, is more complicated than it might seem. Henson’s children have come out in support of the firing, with Brian Henson, the public face of the company, saying that he had reservations about Whitmire’s behavior for over a decade:
I have to say, in hindsight, I feel pretty guilty that I burdened Disney by not having recast Kermit at that point because I knew that it was going to be a real problem. And I have always offered that if they wanted to recast Kermit, I was all for it, and I would absolutely help. I am very glad we have done this now. I think the character is better served to remove this destructive energy around it.
Elsewhere, Lisa Henson told the Times that Whitmire had become increasingly controlling, refusing to hire an understudy and blackballing aspiring puppeteers after the studio tried to cast alternate performers, as a source said to Gizmodo: “[Steve] told Disney that the people who were in the audition room are never allowed to work with the Muppets again.” For a Muppet fan, this is all very painful, so I’ll stop here, except to venture two comments. One is that Darabont and Whitmire may well have been right to be concerned. The second is that in expressing their thoughts, they alienated a lot of the people around them, and their protectiveness toward the material ended in them being removed from the creative process altogether. If they were simply bad at giving notes—and the evidence suggests that at least Darabont was—they weren’t alone. No one gives or takes notes well. You could even argue that the whole infrastructure of movie and television production exists to make the exchange of notes, which usually goes in just one direction, incrementally less miserable. And it doesn’t work.
Both men responded by trying to absorb more creative control into themselves, which is a natural response. Brian Henson recalls Whitmire saying: “I am now Kermit, and if you want the Muppets, you better make me happy, because the Muppets are Kermit.” And the most fascinating passage in Darabont’s correspondence is his proposal for how the show ought to be run in the future:
The crew goes away or stands there silently without milling or chattering about bullshit that doesn’t apply to the job at hand…The director [and crew]…stand there and carefully read the scene out loud word for word. Especially and including all description…The important beats are identified and discussed in terms of how they are to be shot. In other words, sole creative authority is being taken out of the director’s hands. It doesn’t matter that our actors are doing good work if the cameras fail to capture it. Any questions come straight to me by phone or text. If necessary I will shoot the coverage on my iPhone and text it to the set. The staging follows the script to the letter and is no longer willy-nilly horseshit with cameras just hosing it down from whatever angle…If the director tries to not shoot what is written, the director is beaten to death on the spot. A trained monkey is brought in to complete the job.
Reading this, I found myself thinking of an analogous situation that arose when David Mamet was running The Unit. (I’m aware that The Unit wasn’t exactly a great show—I don’t think I got through more than two episodes—but my point remains the same.) Mamet, like Darabont, was unhappy with the scripts that he was getting, but instead of writing everything himself, he wrote a memo on plot structure so lucid and logical that it has been widely shared online as a model of how to tell a story. Instead of raging at those around him, he did what he could to elevate them to his level. It strikes me as the best possible response. But as Kermit might say, that’s none of my business.
Quote of the Day
To get full use of [a] library…there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found…It is a strange but indubitable fact that it is extremely easy for scientific workers to forget the work they themselves have done in the past.
From Venice to Yale
In a recent issue of The New Yorker, the scholar Stephen Greenblatt offers an insightful consideration of a Shakespearean comedy toward which he—like most of us—can hardly help having mixed feelings: “There is something very strange about experiencing The Merchant of Venice when you are somehow imaginatively implicated in the character and actions of its villain.” After recalling his uncomfortable experience as a Jewish undergraduate at Yale in the sixties, Greenblatt provides a beautiful summation of the pragmatic solution at which he arrived:
I wouldn’t attempt to hide my otherness and pass for what I was not. I wouldn’t turn away from works that caused me pain as well as pleasure. Instead, insofar as I could, I would pore over the whole vast, messy enterprise of culture as if it were my birthright…I was eager to expand my horizons, not to retreat into a defensive crouch. Prowling the stacks of Yale’s vast library, I sometimes felt giddy with excitement. I had a right to all of it, or, at least, to as much of it as I could seize and chew upon. And the same was true of everyone else.
Greenblatt, of course, went on to become one of our most valuable literary critics, and his evaluation of The Merchant of Venice is among the best I’ve seen: “If Shylock had behaved himself and remained a mere comic foil…there would have been no disturbance. But Shakespeare conferred too much energy on his Jewish usurer for the boundaries of native and alien, us and them, to remain intact…He did so not by creating a lovable alien—his Jew is a villain who connives at legal murder—but by giving Shylock more theatrical vitality, quite simply more urgent, compelling life, than anyone else in his world has.”
I’ve spent more time thinking about The Merchant of Venice than all but a handful of Shakespeare’s plays, precisely because of the “excess of life” that Greenblatt sees in Shylock, which is at its most impressive in a context where it has no business existing at all. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that Shakespeare’s genius is most visible when you compare him to his sources, which he transforms so completely that it destroys the notion that he was an opportunist who simply borrowed most of his plots. The Merchant of Venice is unique because its models are somehow right there on stage, existing simultaneously with the text, since we can hardly watch it and be unaware of the contrast between the antisemitic caricature of the original and Shylock’s uncanny power. Harold Bloom captures this quality in an extraordinary passage from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:
I have never seen The Merchant of Venice staged with Shylock as comic villain, but that is certainly how the play should be performed…If I were a director, I would instruct my Shylock to act like a hallucinatory bogeyman, a walking nightmare flamboyant with a big false nose and a bright red wig, that is to say, to look like Marlowe’s Barabas. We can imagine the surrealistic effect of such a figure when he begins to speak with the nervous intensity, the realistic energy of Shylock, who is so much of a personality as to at least rival his handful of lively precursors in Shakespeare: Faulconbridge the Bastard in King John, Mercurio and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But these characters all fit their roles, even if we can conceive of them as personalities outside of their plays. Shylock simply does not fit his role; he is the wrong Jew in the right play.
On some level, Shylock is a darker miracle of characterization than even Hamlet or Lear, because so much of his impact seems involuntary, even counterproductive. Shakespeare had no particular reason to make him into anything more than a stock villain, and in fact, his vividness actively detracts from the logic of the story itself, as Greenblatt notes: “Shylock came perilously close to wrecking the comic structure of the play, a structure that Shakespeare only barely rescued by making the moneylender disappear for good at the end of the fourth act.” Bloom, in turn, speaks of “the gap between the human that Shakespeare invents and the role that as playmaker he condemns Shylock to act,” a cognitive divide that tells us more about his art than the plays in which every part has been revised to fit like magic. I often learn more about craft from works of art that I resist than ones with which I agree completely, which only makes sense. When we want to believe in a story’s message, we’re less likely to scrutinize its methods, and we may even forgive lapses of taste or skill because we want to give it the benefit of the doubt. (This is the real reason why aspiring authors should avoid making overt political statements in a story, which encourages friendly critics to read the result more generously than it deserves. It’s gratifying in the moment, but it also can lead to faults going unaddressed until it’s too late to fix them.) Its opposite number is a work of art that we’d love to dismiss on moral or intellectual grounds, but which refuses to let us go. Since we have no imaginable reason to grant it a free pass, its craft stands out all the more clearly. The Merchant of Venice is the ultimate example. It’s the first play that I’d use to illustrate Shakespeare’s gift at creating characters who can seem more real to us than ourselves—which doesn’t make it any easier to read, teach, or perform.
This brings us back to the figure of Greenblatt at Yale, who saw the works that pained him as an essential part of his education. He writes:
I’m now an English professor at Harvard, and in recent years some of my students have seemed acutely anxious when they are asked to confront the crueler strains of our cultural legacy. In my own life, that reflex would have meant closing many of the books I found most fascinating, or succumbing to the general melancholy of my parents. They could not look out at a broad meadow from the windows of our car without sighing and talking about the number of European Jews who could have been saved from annihilation and settled in that very space. (For my parents, meadows should have come with what we now call “trigger warnings.”) I was eager to expand my horizons, not to retreat into a defensive crouch.
The question of how students should confront the problematic works of the past is one that I don’t expect to resolve here, except by noting that The Merchant of Venice represents a crucial data point. Without it, our picture of Shakespeare—and even of his greatness as a writer—is necessarily incomplete. When it comes to matters of education, it helps to keep a few simple tests in mind, and the humanities have an obligation to enable the possibility of this kind of confrontation, while also providing the framework within which it can be processed. Instead of working forward from a set of abstract principles, perhaps we should work backward from the desired result, which is to have the tools that we need when we reach the end of the labyrinth and find Shylock waiting for us. Even if we aren’t ready for him, we may not have a choice. As Bloom observes: “It would have been better for the Jews, if not for most of The Merchant of Venice’s audiences, had Shylock been a character less conspicuously alive.”
Quote of the Day
Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, of course, but tennis players talk to themselves—and answer…Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely…In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk.
