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Last weekend’s post about mind-controlled artificial limbs left a reader his shaking head:

It frankly drives me crazy to watch videos about developments in myoelectric upper-extremity prosthetics like the one you posted and to read commentators like Victoria Turk “herald this breakthrough.” Yes, I can choose not to watch or read, but I’m an upper-extremity amputee, and I’ve worn a body-powered prosthesis most of my life. So why wouldn’t I let my curiosity reign?

Reports like this are crazy-making because for me, the products they tout inevitably disappoint. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t wear the prosthetic device with implanted electrodes, even in the very unlikely event that I were offered the opportunity. They evoke the hoary sci-fi cliché of the melding of man and machine, and while mildly interesting, they aren’t the answer for the everyday, prosthesis-wearing amputee.

I once tried a myoelectric arm with surface electrodes.

I promptly went back to my body-powered prosthesis, which is fitted with a hook for a terminal device. It’s far lighter, easier to manipulate, more dexterous, and more robust, and it’s not subject to the involuntary opening and closing of the surface electrode prosthesis. It also doesn’t discolor in the sun (that ‘hand’ is a silicon glove, of course) or run out of power.

Look at the video and see what the terminal device (the hand itself) can do: open and close. The end. It’s gross motor movement, at best. Dexterity at the individual finger level is coming, but it’s still a long, long way off (decades, if you ask me) from what you, the ‘handed’ majority, enjoy and take completely for granted. As it is, given the prosthetic hands in this video, give me a hook any day.

Then, there’s the bottom line: price. Who pays for these fantastically expensive myoelectric limbs? My new arm cost $7,500 and is as basic as they come. A myoelectric starts in the tens of thousands of dollars. One with implants? Few know, but I imagine that we’d likely start the conversation at $100,000. Impractical, in other words, for anyone but the well-off or those lucky enough to live where the state funds their prostheses (I live in Canada, and the state paid 65 percent of my artificial-limb cost. My supplementary, work-paid health plan covered the rest, but it would have capped at $3g).

For the working man, the poor, those who live in countries where state health care is weak, or in other words, likely for the majority of upper-extremity amputees in the world, simple, body-powered prostheses are the past and for the moment, also the future.

Forgive the rant, but this touched a nerve, as it were.

Martin Amis’ new novel, The Zone of Interest, takes place in the death camps at Auschwitz. Sophie Gilbert provides an overview:

The Zone of Interest is a strange book, indeed; a grim satire, part office comedy, part romance, part lyrical dissection of civilization gone very, very wrong (the sky over the camp one day, we are told, is “a vulgar dark pink, the color of café blancmange”); part visceral, oozing, pestilent horror. The comic interchanges are no less funny for being interspersed among the brutal renderings of depravity, but they do, conversely, make that horror even more jarring. They also remind us of our most basic and familiar impulse when faced with the bleak despair of existence. Amis isn’t making Auschwitz funny—he’s making it human.

The novel weaves between three different narrators. Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is a womanizing “desk murderer” with Aryan good looks who has a clerical position at the camp, but whose Uncle Martin (later revealed to be Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary), grants him a degree of privilege beyond his rank. Paul Doll, colloquially known among officers as “the Old Boozer,” is the ghastly, sociopathically pompous commander, styled after Rudolf Höss and very much in the model of the classic Amis grotesque (his “spongy red chest hair is dotted with beads of sweat”). The last voice belongs to Szmul, one of “the saddest men in the history of the world.” As a Sonderkommando, one of the Jews charged with disposing of the remains of murdered prisoners, Szmul justifies his brazen ability to go on living by listing his three motivations: to bear witness, to seek revenge, and to save a life, “at the rate of one per transport.”

Amis spoke about the idea of Auschwitz as a “mirror of the soul” in a recent interview:

[Y]ou say that Auschwitz, that experience, would tell people who they were. Could you talk about that?

It’s actually a terrifying notion that many survivors say. It’s a real theme of survivor testimony, which is often of astounding quality. Amazing eloquence. But they all said that during peace and civilization you only ever see 5 percent of someone’s character. And you should dread seeing it all, because you find out whether you’re brave, adaptable, determined, immune to despair, and that sort of thing. That’s for the victims. And for the perpetrators, you find the terrible potentialities … But the banality of evil, Robert Jay Lifton said the best thing about that: “Well, they might have been banal when they started out, but they weren’t banal once they started killing people.”

In a review, Ruth Franklin pronounces Amis more a master of words than concepts:

Amis is one of the most inventive users of language currently at work in English — his sentences cannot help crackling — as well as a uniquely talented satirist. But when it comes to the deeper problems of the Nazi pathology that gave rise to the jargon he so brilliantly parodies, he does not have much to offer. Is the brutal Paul Doll correct in his repeated insistence that he is “completely normal”? Is Golo Thomsen, as he claims, one of “hundreds of thousands . . . maybe millions” of ­Nazis who passively tried to obstruct the regime? Was Auschwitz truly a mirror of the soul that reflected people as they ­really were? Such questions may be unanswerable. Still, a novel that raises them should at least make an attempt at grappling with them.

But, in a damning assessment, Michael Hofman finds even Amis’ style overwrought:

It elicits not one but both types of unwelcome reaction from the reader: both the ‘so what?’ and the ‘I don’t believe you’ and sometimes both together, as in many of the weather sentences (in The Zone of Interest the weather ends up having to stand in for reality). ‘The grey sky went from oyster to mackerel’: it’s a pretty notion and catchpenny-clever, but really not. The big and medium-sized things in it – the vision thing – almost completely don’t work. At one stage, Thomsen writes:

I walked on for another ten minutes; then I turned and looked. The Buna-Werke – the size of a city. Like Magnetigorsk (a city called Sparkplug) in the USSR. It was due to become the largest and most advanced factory in Europe. When the whole operation came on line, said Burckl, it would need more electricity than Berlin.

I can’t be persuaded here that anyone is seeing anything. First the stray Soviet comparison (and – mainly authorial – explanatory, as it were, self-basting gibe), then the slither (‘due to become’) in time, then the switch of person to Burckl. There’s nothing here, not even a placeholder, a piece of cardboard with ‘Forest’ on it. Or take a swank Berlin government room in 1942 or 1943: ‘The air was full of tobacco smoke and existential unhappiness.’ Surely not! One might as well say it was full of low-hanging zeugmas. I can’t imagine a contemporary speaker (‘I liaise’ or not) for these lines from a departing train: ‘And now Berlin started off on its journey, westward – Friedrichshain with its blocked sebaceous glands and pestilential cafeterias, the Ahnenerbe with its skeletons and skulls, its scurf and snot, the Potsdamer Platz with its smashed faces and half-empty uniforms.’ They are just magniloquent and omniscient like any other third-generation synthesised Isherwood.

Reviewing the book last month, Joyce Carol Oates also found Amis’ style an awkward match for his subject:

“The Zone of Interest,” like “Time’s Arrow,” focusses upon the vicissitudes of personality and situation, and does not take up such larger questions, except fleetingly. The author’s rage at Holocaust horrors is portioned into scenes and sentences; it does not gather into a powerful swell, to overwhelm or terrify. Is it inherent in postmodernism that, no matter the subject, such emotions are likely to be held at bay? “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” as Melville declares in “Moby-Dick”; but such mightiness may be precluded by a mode of writing whose ground bass is irony rather than empathy. In the afterword, Amis cites the famous passage in Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir in which Levi asks a German guard, “Warum?,” and is told by the guard, “Hier ist kein warum”—“There is no why here.” Perhaps that terse reply is the only adequate response to all questions of “Why?” relating to the Holocaust.

Liam O’Brien entertainingly surveys the history of computer-generated literature:

Vonnegut made up a computer that wrote love poems in 1950 – and the Brits did the same thing, but IRL. The reason why you don’t have a bunch of computer-written books on your shelf is because they’re traditionally looked on as novelties. A few years back a Russian computer wrote a Tolstoy homage in the style of Murakami, but unless McSweeney’s has hired this program on the sly, this is the first and last we’ve heard of it. And this isn’t new – over thirty years ago, a program called “Racter” allegedly composed an entire book called The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed. A decade later, another programmer and his creation composed a apparently-not-bad Jacqueline Susann knockoff. Seven years later, someone managed to create the automated equivalent of a tiresome MFA student.

Zooming out, O’Brien suggests contemporary novelists have little to fear:

[A]lgorithms are fairly good at making and collating content, but not literature. The Associated Press and Forbes uses bots to author articles; Penguin Random House doesn’t have the same option. (Though I do have a very convincing theory that James Michener was in fact a clockwork automaton.)  Which brings us to the story of Philip Parker, who created a program that’s effectively allowed him to “write” over 100,000 books – granted, they’re books that nobody would ever buy, esoteric (and expensive) market research and industry study titles like The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats. The program is a content compiler rather than a composer – though Parker claims to be able to write poetry and fiction with it – and Parker has posed it as a crucial element in getting textbooks and other types of educational content to poor areas, all because it cuts out the author.

But in a review of Peter Swirski’s From Literature to Biterature, Jennifer Howard notes that not everyone is confident that humans have a definite literary advantage:

Inspired in part by the work of Stanisław Lem, Swirski analyses the prospects for “computhors” as he calls these imagined but (he believes) soon-to-be-real machine entities. His focus zigzags across the fields of artificial intelligence, computing history, cognitive science, narrative theory, the evolution of men and machines, and post-Turing attempts to figure out how to identify computer intelligence if (Swirski would say when) it arises. “Underlying my explorations is the premise that, at a certain point in the already foreseeable future, computers will be able to create works of literature in and of themselves”, he writes.

The trick will be recognizing that we have arrived at that point: “There will never be a moment of epiphany, a discontinuous rupture, a sudden awakening” – no “equivalent of a burning bush”, Swirski writes. It might not even matter whether humans will be able to recognize true autonomous intelligence in a machine. More important is whether we are ready to believe it’s possible. … The “computhors” themselves may well not care whether we fully appreciate what they create, Swirski speculates. They’ll be too busy doing their own thing.

Stefany Anne Golberg considers why Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature:

Written words are a compact between writer and reader. “A writer should never say to himself,” wrote Sartre in What Is Literature?, “‘Bah! I’ll be lucky if I have three thousand readers, but rather, ‘What would happen if everybody read what I wrote?’” A writer can ignore this compact or take responsibility for it. The imperative remains.

It matters, therefore, what institutions a writer allies with, what her political sympathies are, what prizes she accepts. This is to say, Sartre’s rejection of the Nobel Prize was not personal. It was metaphysical. Every act I take as a writer, Sartre was saying, affects the existence of my readers. Accepting the Nobel Prize would have been, for Sartre, to compromise the freedom of his readers. Indeed, it would have compromised the freedom of all mankind.

Golberg goes on to contemplate why, for Camus, accepting the Nobel posed less of an existential conflict:

The difference lay, perhaps, in Camus’ understanding of freedom. The human condition, for Camus, was fundamentally absurd. Man desires reason, meaning, happiness. And yet he lives in a world that is irrational, cold, and silent. Such a confrontation of life’s absurdity could drive a man to despair, possibly to suicide. But despair is only a negation of the Absurd. When one truly embraces the Absurd — i.e., embraces life with all its unreason and messy contradictions — there is an imperative to live. Only in the full acceptance of the absurdity of life can man become free. True freedom is found not just in action — in existing — but in coming to terms with existence. In acceptance.

(Image: 1965 sketch of Sartre for the New York Times by Reginald Gray via Wikimedia Commons)

Fred Kaplan reviews Laura Poitras’ new Snowden documentary:

At one very interesting point in the film, Snowden tells Poitras and Greenwald, “Some of these documents are legitimately classified,” and their release “could do great harm” to intelligence sources and methods. He adds, “I trust you’ll be responsible” in handling them.

This is what most baffles me about the whole Snowden case. What kind of whistleblower hands over a digital library of extremely classified documents on a vast range of topics, shrugs his shoulders, and says, I’ll let you decide what to publish? He tells the two journalists that he’s “too biased” to pick and choose himself. What does that mean? These are esoteric, in some cases highly technical documents; he’s in a better position to know their implications than Poitras and Greenwald; certainly he could warn them, “Oops, I shouldn’t have included this one. It’s really sensitive.”

During a profile of Poitras, George Packer provides his take on the film:

Among the leaked documents are details of foreign-intelligence gathering that do not fall under the heading of unlawful threats to American democracy—what Snowden described as his only concern. [N.S.A. whistle-blower William] Binney, generally a fervent Snowden supporter, told USA Today that Snowden’s references to “hacking into China” went too far: “So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.” This is a distinction that Poitras might have induced Binney to pursue. Similarly, the tensions between Greenwald and Assange—their struggle over Snowden’s legacy and the rights to his archive, and its ideological implications—aren’t depicted onscreen. Because Poitras is so close to her subject, politically and psychologically, “Citizenfour” is not the tour de force it might have been.

Regardless, Friedersdorf recommends the documentary:

“I feel good in my human experience to know that I can contribute to the good of others,” Snowden says in one scene. In another, Greenwald delights in a righteous “fuck you” to a spying government he regards as criminal and officials he sees as betraying core liberal principles. At film’s end, we learn that Snowden is living with his longtime girlfriend in Moscow in circumstances far more pleasant than a Supermax prison, though how long he’ll be permitted to remain there is anyone’s guess.

History is rife with dissidents who took satisfaction in various causes—some worthy, others abominable. Snowden’s critics will continue to insist that his actions were unjustified, no matter how earnest he appears to be about the nobility of his purpose. Yet I suspect that even they will find some merit in this film, if only for its footage. Seldom has the public gotten so intimate a glimpse at how a key figure felt and acted in private moments of profound historic consequence.

Wired talked to Poitras about the encryption tools she uses:

In the closing credits of Citizenfour, Poitras took the unusual step of adding an acknowledgment of the free software projects that made the film possible: The roll call includes the anonymity software Tor, the Tor-based operating system Tails, GPG encryption, Off-The-Record (OTR) encrypted instant messaging, hard disk encryption software Truecrypt, and Linux. All of that describes a technical setup that goes well beyond the precautions taken by most national security reporters, not to mention documentary filmmakers.

Poitras argues that without those technologies, neither her reporting on the Snowden leaks nor her film itself would have been possible.

And T.C. at the Economist reveals the film’s ending:

Ms Poitras has one surprise left to spring, and it may turn out to be a big one. Mr Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he claimed asylum after the American government cancelled his passport while he was travelling to South America. The film finishes with a visit from Mr Greenwald, in which he and Mr Snowden discuss the existence of a second leaker inside the NSA—something that has been rumoured for months in the press and on computer-security blogs. When Mr Greenwald shows Mr Snowden what his new source is offering, his eyebrows almost climb off the top of his head. Like an action film setting up a plot hook for a sequel, viewers are told in no uncertain terms to expect more leaks—and soon.

It is conducting “1,000 interviews with white people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness.” The trailer:

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The project got ridiculed on Twitter last week. Jessica Roy interviewed filmmaker Whitney Dow about the response:

The level of reaction I got [online] was, This is outrageous, what you’re doing. My response to it is:

What is outrageous about speaking the truth? The one video about the woman talking about the woman being afraid of black men and the statistics saying 40 percent of whites think black men are inherently violent: It’s a real fact. It’s an uncomfortable fact; it’s a strange, terrible fact; but why is saying that out loud so outrageous? I think that my goal is to get white people to sort of confront the disconnect between how they experience the world and the reality of the place they hold in the world. So far, I think it’s done a good job of creating these conversations.

Carla Murphy also spoke with Dow:

[Q.] I’m going to be frank. I’m not really interested in hearing white folks talk about race or whiteness. I’ve been a minority in majority-white spaces since I was 12 years old. I feel like I know what your subjects are going to say. Why should I take the time to watch?

[A.] I would say that people like you and me who have thought about race a lot and have been around and processed it, maybe that’s not who this project is for. But, again, I go back to all these women of color who’ve written me from Albuquerque to Australia, who’ve said it was really painful but incredibly cathartic to hear what white people say when they’re not in the room. That’s all I can say.

Interviews from the series can be viewed here.

Jordan Pearson flags a first-of-its-kind “addiction”:

San Diego doctors recently identified the first case of “internet addiction” involving Google Glass in a 31 year-old Navy serviceman who checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse. His symptoms included involuntary temple tapping and seeing his dreams through Glass’ tiny gray box. He used Glass 18 hours a day for work, only taking it off to sleep and bathe. Why? Because it made him very, very good at his job.

According to a paper published yesterday in Addictive Behaviours, the patient used Glass to quickly take photos of convoy trucks and tag them with identifying numbers and equipment lists (his exact job title is not specified), boosting his workplace productivity. He became so dependent on his newfound abilities at work that an addiction began to form, according to the doctors. But, really, what was he addicted to? The internet? Google Glass itself? No—he was hooked on work, and Glass merely made it possible.

Jesse Singal can relate:

This is consistent with “game transfer phenomena,” or GTP, a weird cognitive quirk that I’ve written about for the Boston Globe here and here. It’s when you’re playing a game that involves some repetitive sensory elements — images or sounds or button combinations — and aspects of them start to seep into the real world and/or your dreams after you turn the game off.

It’s happened to me in the past, and when it has, it’s always been worst around bedtime — I remember trying to sleep after playing a first-person shooter game and, upon closing my eyes, feeling the sensation of traveling through the game’s hallways and seeing slight hallucinations of walls racing past. Another time, during the height of my GTA III–playing days, I was wandering around near my parents’ house and wanted to look behind me, and I could feel the part of my brain responsible for getting me to press the middle mouse button — that is, the command to look behind you in the game — go off. (No, these are not stories I will be telling on first dates anytime soon.)