Looking back at wrongful death cases in the United States reveals a startling fact: the financial value of a child has changed dramatically.
In 1896, for example, the parents of a two-year-old killed due to the negligence of the Southern Railroad Company of Georgia asked a judge for compensation. They argued that their child performed errands worth two dollars per month, but they received nothing beyond the cost of a burial. The judge concluded “that the child was ‘of such tender years as to be unable to have any earning capacity, and hence the defendant could not be held liable in damages.’”
Today, however, parents do not need to prove the economic value of a lost child to receive compensation. Instead they refer to their emotional pain. On this basis, a judge in a 1979 case awarded the parents of a three-year-old who died from fluoride poisoning at the dentist $750,000.
So why did the value of a child change from worthless to nearly priceless?
.. She argues that children became “sacralized” in the late 1800s and early 1900s—a process that transformed children from un-sentimentalized but economically useful little people to economically useless yet emotionally priceless treasures.
.. Middle class reformers led a movement against child labor, successfully passing legislation despite the objections of working class parents who relied on their children’s contributions to the family finances. Reducing infant mortality became a primary public health concern. Car accidents that killed children incited previously incomprehensible expressions of sorrow and outrage that manifested in public memorials.
.. The dramatic changes in how we conceive of childhood remind us that ascribing outcomes to “the market” can easily obscure how the inputs of supply and demand are coloured by changing social and cultural factors. A cost-benefit analysis of national parks will yield very different answers to a nation of couch potatoes compared to a nation of John Muir outdoorsmen.
Gun-Control Activists Need a History
By 1977 — the time of the NRA coup — those numbers had surged to almost 19,000 and 57,000, respectively. Adjusting for population growth, the murder rate had almost doubled, and the rape rate had more than tripled. The overall violent crime rate tripled, and it kept going up, peaking at almost five times the 1960 rate:
.. If the NRA hadn’t reinvented itself, some other organization would have risen in its place.
.. America has come a long way since then. In 1980, the murder rate peaked at double the rate in 1960 — before falling in 2014 to a rate well below even 1960’s low number. In the meantime, the number of privately held firearms has surged, as has the number of Americans with a concealed-carry permit. It turns out that millions of law-abiding Americans can exercise their Second Amendment rights without turning the United States into a free-fire zone. More guns can indeed correlate with less crime.
.. The Right tells Americans that criminals are indeed worth fearing, but you can have confidence in yourself if you own a gun and know how to use it — that free citizens can and should take responsibility for defending themselves and their families.
.. The history of the “gun lobby” is the history of an American idea — indeed, of American culture — and selective retellings of that history cannot and will not erase the desire for independence and autonomy from the American heart.
50 years ago today the word “hypertext” was introduced
So for me it was an important rollout, a rollout of my ideas. And I took it very seriously. And because of my partially theatrical background, I was very conscious of giving a good show.
.. I saw it as my major career rollout, daring and intense. I wasn’t so much scared as excited and keyed up. I was going to tell the world, from a literary and philosophical point of view, where interactive documents would go. I was about to tell a technical group that their whole world would be redefined.
.. What kind of reaction did you get from others?
No one, absolutely no one that I met, could imagine interactive computer screens. Whereas I could see them with my eyes closed, practically touch them and make them respond. It was very sensual... My great-grandfather, for example, who was a very smart man, a science teacher—he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. No one could imagine what an interactive screen would be. No one I talked to could imagine what an interactive screen would be, whereas I saw and felt them sensually in my mind and at my fingertips. Yet to me this was an extension of literature as we had always known it... My great-grandfather, for example, who was a very smart man, a science teacher—he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. No one could imagine what an interactive screen would be. No one I talked to could imagine what an interactive screen would be, whereas I saw and felt them sensually in my mind and at my fingertips. Yet to me this was an extension of literature as we had always known it... I never got leverage. Neither did a lot of other people; Jobs grabbed a brass ring and knew what to do with it... Unfortunately I overemphasized the jump link, jumping from page to page, which is all the Web does. (Along with the regrettable emphasis on fonts and layout, foisted on the public by Simonyi and Warnock.) [Charles Simonyi, who oversaw Microsoft’s development of Word, and John Warnock, the co-founder of Adobe Systems.].. And software—interactive software—is events on a screen that affect the heart and mind of the user, and interact,and have consequences. So understanding the theatrics (some say rhetoric, some say cascading) of interaction is the real issue, not just making the wheels go around... I came to see that the issues I was facing for electronic documents were not algorithms but data structure... I submitted five papers to conferences that would meet in 1965; all were accepted! But the biggie was to the ACM National Conference... I’d been reading a lot of journal articles, so I knew how ACM people thought: they were interested in files and operating systems and the like... I spent a great deal of time and work on it. And, as I recall, my great-grandfather died while I was working on it, and that was a great sorrow to me, but I had to keep on it... And while I respected them very much, I also thought that I was opening a new chapter into a new part of the world.
.. I was by no means modest. Although I wasn’t telling anybody about it, I thought hypertext would lead to a millennial system of changes, and so it has, but much less influenced by my own work—my designs and ideas—than I’d hoped... The written paper is in academic style. It bears almost no relation to the oral presentation I gave, which was intended to be rousing. I was used to off-the-cuff public speaking, but I scripted this one tightly.
.. I know I have a tape recording of the talk, and I know I have the original artwork and slides, so if anyone wanted to put it all together and restore it to an audiovisual presentation, it could be done... Did you get in touch with Doug Engelbart?
Yes. The next year, 1966, I flew out to see him with William Jovanovich, head of Harcourt, Brace Publishers, where I worked at the time. He showed us the mouse, and I was instantly converted... You could say it was the high-water mark of my career, just as Engelbart’s 1968 demo was the high-water mark of his... I hardly understood academic politics. Underneath the handshakes and overt appreciation, everyone is backstabbing for the same money... I got a call from the Central Intelligence Agency—at least the guy said he was from the Central Intelligence Agency—and he intimated that they might back me, and I said, “sure.” That conversation went on for several years, but no backing appeared. I actually did go to McLean to meet there once, so it had been an authentic call.
.. The surprise at the meeting was that I was attacked by several Artificial Intelligence guys in the room. It was years before I understood that there was a dog-and-cat relation between AI and hypertext—AI guys thought we were stealing their rightful territory. (I was actually followed at one conference by a famous AI guy who began, “Hypertext is evil.”)
.. Not only did the AI guys hate hypertext, but it turns out that everybody has a different notion of what hypertext should be. For example, HyperCard on the early Macintosh. I couldn’t understand it then; I still don’t understand it now. A very strange system. But that just shows the kaleidoscopic variety of thoughts that these concepts engender.
.. My motto is, you can’t think new thoughts in old words.
.. In what sense did you think “hypertext” was hyper?
“Hyper” in the sense of extended and generalized, as in “hypercube” and “hyperspace.” My father-in-law was a psychologist, and he was disturbed at the word because he thought “hyper” meant pathological and agitated... I didn’t choose the name “Xanadu,” I don’t think, until ’66 or ’67, when I was at Harcourt, Brace Publishers.
.. The fundamental notions haven’t changed—parallel pages with visible connection.
.. whereas I consider it essential to see pages side by side, as in the Talmud, as in medieval manuscripts, as in any number of documents over the centuries. This is an essential part of the electronic document which we don’t have yet.
.. My team—I don’t take any credit for it, but the guys I was leading—came up with a brilliant system of addressing, based on what is now called tumblers.
.. in the last of those two years, Tim Berners-Lee created the Web. So we might well have been the hypertext system of the world if we had stuck with the original 1979 design.
Ev Williams became a billionaire by helping to create the free and open web. Now, he’s betting against it.
you might expect someone to recognize him. But as he gets on a downtown train, no one turns a head.
Despite serving as a board member at one of the five largest social networks, and a mainstay of the Bay Area tech industry for almost two decades, the kind of fame attached to the names of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or the “Google guys” has eluded Williams.
.. His startups have nearly all specialized in the same abstract medium: text boxes.
.. In fact, you are reading this very story on the open web—unless you found it on the Facebook app on your phone, in which case you are reading a copy nearly identical to the open-web version of the story, except that yours loaded much faster and lives on Facebook’s servers.)
.. “I think the distribution points are going to consolidate.”
The distribution points are the search engines and the social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and the messaging apps. Also on that list are YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Facebook), Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook), and Facebook Messenger (ditto). By linking the web together, or hosting normally data-heavy content for free, these distribution nodes seize more and more users. And because each of the nodes is more interesting than any one individual’s personal site, people who used to go to personal sites wind up at the nodes instead.
.. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future.
.. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, argues in his book The Master Switch that every major telecommunications technology has followed the same pattern: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness
.. “Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale,” he told me.
.. Josh Benton, a media critic at Harvard, once described Medium as “YouTube for prose,”
.. “I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people,”
.. They don’t have personal sites. … They don’t get personal.”
.. For all the talk of their radical openness, blogs had mostly been the domain of those with hosting space, programming experience, and the time to write them.
.. Odeo wanted to be to podcasts what Blogger was to blogs, but internet audio was still too disorganized for a business to succeed.
.. the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007—was the most heated the aughts ever got in Silicon Valley. In this period, Google acquired YouTube, an 18-month-old company, for $1.6 billion. Facebook opened to all users, not just college students. TIME declared “You” the Person of the Year, a silly gimmick that nonetheless initiated the era of social-media hype. And Apple debuted the first iPhone.
.. the internet of 2008 can seem distant. That year’s presidential election was famously waged via web blogs. By 2012, much of the conversation had moved to Twitter.
.. “If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says
.. Medium’s marketing position isn’t far from Whole Foods either—it wants to be the big corporation that upscale customers trust.
.. Each of these sites still lives on its own domain name, but in terms of design and function, each is essentially a Medium page. Their stories also live on Medium’s servers.
.. Two years later, he founded Medium, describing it as a place for content that was too short for Blogger and too long for Twitter.
.. This is Medium’s reason for existing: to protect individual writers in the fierce and nasty content jungles.
.. It wants to do so by adopting many of the tics and habits of the original blogosphere—the intertextuality, the back-and-forth, the sense of amateurism
.. Medium, yes, will just be another platform, but it will run the open web in an emulator.
.. Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites.
.. The web of 2008—the web that helped elect President Obama—has already withered.
.. but ours had more creativity, ours weren’t just for the money.