Category Archives: entertainment and popular culture

Facebook Loses Face

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Facebook is offline. And when I noticed this, my first impulse was to post to Facebook about it. Hmm. I understand this is a global problem — although I can’t tell from news stories whether it’s offline for all users or some users — and it also affects other Facebook apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. The DNS management system Cloudflare says that FB’s Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes have been “withdrawn from the Internet,” whatever that means.

It possibly wasn’t a hack.

Two Facebook security team members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyberattack caused the issues. That’s because the technology behind the apps was still different enough that one hack was not likely to affect all of them at once.

This happened the day after FB was featured on 60 Minutes in an interview with a former employee who left with boxes of documents she has shared with the Securities and Exchange Commission and which were leaked to a lot of news outlets. The former employee claims the platform’s ranking algorithm amplifies “angry” content, contrary to what FB claims to be doing with its content. She also said Facebook turned off safeguards designed to tamp down misinformation and inflammatory speech after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s US elections, and that this was done purely to ramp up traffic and make more money.

See also Kevin Roose, Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew, at The New York Times.

Facebook is in trouble.

Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.  …

… The documents, shared with The [Wall Street] Journal by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, reveal a company worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.

Mark Zuckerberg might want to consider cashing out now, while the cashing out is good, rather than wait until the company’s value begins to deflate.

This whole thing with algorithms needs more examination, although not by me, as I am not a technogeeky sort of person. During my time writing for About dot com I learned how much Google algorithms can make or break web traffic and commerce, and Google is perpetually tweaking its algorithms to benefit itself at the expense of others. Maybe some kind of regulation is in order, although possibly by some independent commission and not the government itself.

Dumb and Dumber

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Last night a couple of right-wing loons tried to shut down the performance of Julius Caesar in Central Park. I found a photo of one of them and annotated it:

You are welcome to use the image wherever. See the New York Times and Washington Post on what went down. I already wrote the New York Times:

Regarding “Two Protesters Disrupt “Julius Caesar” in Central Park” (June 17) — The alleged disruptors are guilty of massive cultural illiteracy, since Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a warning against violence, not a celebration of regicide. They should be required to watch or read the play and write essays explaining what it’s about. Failing that, they could be sentenced to wearing dunce caps and writing “I will stop being a culturally illiterate twit” on a blackboard ten thousand times. And put a film of that on social media, please.

See also:

Peter Pan the Undead

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I only watched some of ‘Peter Pan Live” on NBC three or so nights ago, but I gave it a B minus. The “flying” was klutzy, but the actors on the whole did a good job. I understand the singing was not actually live, which seems like cheating and rather negates the fun of it being live at all.

The reviews, which have been mixed but mostly meh, missed a lot of points, though. One reviewer complained there was no live audience reacting to it, which killed it for her. I may be forgetting, but I don’t think the old Mary Martin television version had a live audience either. A couple of reviewers didn’t seem to realize Peter Pan Live (PPL) was a revival of a 1954 musical (Mary Martin? who?). One thought it was the 1904 or whatever play set to music, and another thought it was too “British” and that the actress who played Mrs. Darling, Wendy et al.’s mother, was “underused.”

There were also complaints about the three hour time, and one review said that the show had been padded with songs from other musicals. Was it? I watched parts of it and may have missed those. The frequent commercial breaks didn’t help, though.

Best tweet: “It needed more cowbell.”

A few things that bothered me —

I remember the Tiger Lily tribe as being children, or at least they were like children. I saw a video of the Mary Marin production (MMPP) not many years ago and remember the tribe riding 1950s-style kiddie scooters and maybe a couple of tricycles. In PPL, the Tiger Lily tribe were not just adult men; they were a muscular crew wearing skimpy costumes. Under most circumstances I’m happy to watch muscular dancing men in skimpy costumes, but in PPL I confess it made me a little uncomfortable. Good thing the feathered loin cloths stayed in place, although a wardrobe malfunction probably would have been a real “first” for NBC and boosted DVD-Blu Ray sales.

It’s traditional for the same actor to play Mr. George Darling, Wendy et al.’s father, and Captain Hook. There was an earlier musical version (music by Leonard Bernstein) that had Boris Karloff playing Papa/Hook. Cyril Ritchard was Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in MMPP, and I’ve sometimes wondered if Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow wasn’t at least partly inspired by Ritchard’s Hook. Or maybe I read that somewhere. Anyway, in PPL Christopher Walken played Captain Hook only. The same actor (Christian Borle) who played Mr. Smee was also Mr. Darling, although I didn’t realize that until I looked it up, because the two characters bore no resemblance to each other. Even so, that doesn’t send the same message.

The larger point is that in MMPP, Neverland was a land of children, and the villainous pirates were the only adults. The pirates, led by a captain who subliminally represented Father, an adult authority, were infuriated by or perhaps jealous of youth itself. In PPL, not only was the Tiger Lily tribe adult, but some of the Lost Boys clearly were old enough to shave, and had been for a few years. So the subtle psychological undertones were muddled.

I give PPL points for casting an actual dog actor, Bowdie, in the role of Nana. The crocodile was not played by an actual crocodile, but was a hoot and definitely underused. Christopher Walken underplayed Hook, which seemed a little out of step with the general rah-rah of the rest of the cast, but reviewers mostly loved him. I thought Allison Williams was fine as PP, although her singing voice is less robust than was Mary Martin’s. And, of course Allison Williams isn’t Mary Martin, who developed the musical and that role for herself and pretty much owns it even now.

Many of us children of the 1950s fondly remember being allowed to stay up to watch the black and white, not technically sophisticated Peter Pan with Martin and Ritchard. Whether children in the age of CGI graphics feel the same about PPL, who knows? The ending, with Wendy’s daughter flying off with Peter Pan, strikes me as a bit creepy now. And the strings were showing. Maybe the thing really is past its prime.

I understand ratings fell short of what was expected, but you don’t run a three-hour-long children’s program on a school night. Duh, NBC.