I believe his point was that Men are being raised by Women, and thus not learning what it is to be masculine from a male authority and mentor figure. And the turnout is piss poor (in his opinion, and the point of the character in the movie) consumer driven zombies chasing satisfaction in shopping for things.

I’m not going to examine that. However, I do agree to an extent the Father figure in society has not been holding up his end of the bargain. What stirred this up is Julia Allison pointing to a new book from the TED organization, discussing the “Demise of Guys”. She summed it up, as one can only do on Twitter:

I see it constantly: the demise of (real) MEN. RT @MediaReDEF: New TED ebook warns of the demise of guys bit.ly/KkQWNz

—
Julia Allison (@JuliaAllison) May 25, 2012

The TED article puts it this way:

In their provocative ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, celebrated psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say that an addiction to video games and online porn have created a generation of shy, socially awkward, emotionally removed, and risk-adverse young men who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school, and employment. Taking a critical look at a problem which is tearing at families and societies everywhere, The Demise of Guys suggests that our young men are suffering from a new form of “arousal addiction,” and introduce a bold new plan for getting them back on track. The book is based on a popular TED Talk which Zimbardo did in 2011, and includes extensive research as well as a TED-exclusive survey that drew responses from more than 20,000 men. We recently spoke with Zimbardo and Duncan about their ideas.

And of course, my first recollection of this crisis of Men idea originated from a great article in The Atlantic, “The End of Men“:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.

So, women are doing better. Men are doing worse. Is it because society has evolved, and modern culture favors the gentle, team based, communicative methods of the feminine? Does this in fact end up hurting women because Men aren’t able to function properly in this world and end up escaping to a world of fantasy video games and needing extreme arousal in order to interact?

Unlike the characters of Fight Club, I don’t blame the other gender. The problem is that we are raising ourselves. Father figures are either absent or failing. New methods of communication and community has enabled us to seek out substitutes. The only problem is that for various reasons, our mentors end up being other people in similar situations. So you get a cultural echo chamber where we trade advice like characters in American Pie trading sex moves. And the results are just as terrible, and less comical.

Divorce rates are increasing. Single parent households are on the rise. And while it is great that women don’t feel shunned from a community for raising a family alone, it certainly doesn’t lead to a situation where boys have great role models. Often, even if there is a father figure in the home, he isn’t the shining 50s nuclear family pillar of the community Don Draper (in his public life) type. He probably got laid off because his manufacturing job got exported. He sits around the house depressed. He takes more style tips from reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond” than the pages of GQ. There is a reason every television ad you see portrays Dad as the dumb oaf in the family who learns a valuable life lesson from whatever product is being hawked.

Understandably, Men of my generation aren’t seeing great role models. But we live in the information age! We have a valuable tool available to us all the time. We can use the internet to learn all those lessons we didn’t get, right? Well, yeah, if someone would post them. But, your Dad isn’t posting life lessons. He can barely upload a photo to Facebook. Instead, we talk to our peers and try to trade things we pick up along the way. I believe this is part of the proliferation of things like Lifehacker, Reddit, fashion blogs, and one of my favorites The Art of Manliness. These are digital textbooks, trying to pass on the lessons our Fathers didn’t pass on to us.

[On a side note, I'm not attacking any of these sites. In fact, I subscribe to Art of Manliness on RSS. I think the author Brett kind of taps into the same sentiment I am going all Andy Rooney on. See his "about" page:

And as I looked around at the men my age, it seemed to me that many were shirking responsibility and refusing to grow up. They had lost the confidence, focus, skills, and virtues that men of the past had embodied and were a little lost. The feminism movement did some great things, but it also made men confused about their role and no longer proud of the virtues of manliness. This, coupled with the fact that many men were raised without the influence of a good father, has left a generation adrift as to what it means to be an honorable, well-rounded man.

Talking about honorable manliness was to me a niche seemingly not covered on the web or elsewhere, and I decided to start The Art of Manliness to talk about all things manly- both the serious and the fun, but with the ultimate eye toward encouraging readers to be better husbands, fathers, brothers, men.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, nor do I claim that I’m an expert on all things manly. I started this blog not because I had all the answers to being a man, but because I wanted to explore the questions with other men. Thankfully, I’ve found a whole community of men who wish to discover the lost art of manliness too.

This is great! Ingenuity of boys to solve a problem! However, the problem is that its a cheat-sheet. The quick and dirty method instead of the underlying lessons. We're learning to get by with duct tape and string instead of building strong foundations. We get "10 tips on how to have a great interview to land that job" instead of learning lessons about building relationships, integrity, and the pride in your work that really lead to great careers. There is a world of difference between following a bullet point list of things to do on a date, and knowing how to be a gentleman. Are we really creating great men, or actors who can play the part?

“Do What You Love” Is Bad Advice

The problem is that for many, that is just unrealistic:

We all get told at some point (if not over and over again), “Do what you love and the money will follow,” and it’s just plain bad advice. The number of people who make a lot of money doing what they love is so insignificantly small that it’s an unrealistic and useless thing to model. The most unfortunate thing about this is that it makes people feel like they are failing when they don’t achieve it.

So, what then?

KEY INSIGHT:  Consider thinking about your work/life strategy like this:

• Do what you love for free.
• Work for money.
• Change how you do your job to feel less tortured about it—and maybe even feel pretty good about it.
• Spend the money you make on doing the things you love when you’re not at work.

End of insight: Please read it again.

If you can’t do what you love, focus on doing what you love outside of work. Think of the parts of work you do like and enjoy that.

The CW pitched itself on Thursday as “the first fully converged network” — but it has competition on that front. TBS and TNT, two cable channels owned by Turner Broadcasting, rather dramatically said that two years from now, they won’t be linear channels, they’ll be “branded video destinations” that just happen to have a linear component.

This is exactly how I believe the “networks” and television channels will exist in the future. No longer do you have a list of channels with scheduled programming. People want to watch programs when they want to watch them, on-demand. However, it is difficult to find “new” things to watch. One of the undervalued aspects of networks is that they curate shows. When you turn on a channel that you liked before, you are buying into the idea that the network will put out more product you like. Think HBO building a rapport with Sopranos so you trust that Game of Thrones will be good.

It could be difficult to do this with random websites. Do you google “cop drama” and hope you find something good, and not some 5th grader’s home movie project? Networks could serve as these curators. TNT already is moving to this with their “We Know Drama” slogan. TBS is “Very Funny”. So, if I am in the mood for a sitcom, I could go to TBS’s iOS app, or website, or TV channel – whatever my preferred medium, but know I was getting a certain quality and type of program.

Most of these people blame HBO, because the only way to get the show rightfuckingnowthissecond is to subscribe to HBO. Which means you have to subscribe to Cable, since you can’t just pay HBO to stream their programming over the internet. Otherwise, you have to wait 6 whole months for the series to come on DVD (or iTunes). So, the only solution is to illegally pirate/download it. Of course.

This idea has been discuss ad naseum over and over lately.

“HBO hasn’t helped the problem by making the show tough to watch online for the young and cable-less,” notes Greenberg. “The show isn’t available through Hulu or Netflix, iTunes offers only Season 1, and using HBO’s own streaming site HBO Go requires a cable subscription.”

For the millions of Americans who don’t subscribe to HBO, or who may not even watch shows on a television, this means there is no legal way to watchGame of Thrones. If you only watch TV on your laptop, there’s no way you’re going to pay $50/month for cable and another $15/month for HBO. -Forbes

My favorite response to this idea is by Andy Ihnatko:

The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement.

Here’s the terms of use for commercial content: you have to pay for this stuff. This means either you need to wait for it to become commercially available, or if you torrent it today you need to buy it when it gets released. So long as you buy it as soon as it’s possible to do so, I can confidently reach for my “No Harm Done” rubber stamp. Some content is commercially unavailable because the publisher or distributor has no desire to ever release it. I’ll even go so far as to say that downloading it illegally is a positive thing; you’re helping to keep this creative work alive.

If you avoid purchasing the media in some form, however…you’re just one of those people who prefer to steal things if they think they can get away with it. Simple as that. Get off your high horse.

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

But, I’ll ignore the “I demand HBO’s awesome well crafted expensive to produce content on my terms immediately instead of in a method that makes money for them” argument.

The other aspect of this argument is “See, HBO, look at all these people who want your show? That is money on the table because you won’t give it to them in an easy to access format.” There is of course the idea that they would have to give up lucrative licensing deals and start a whole new consumer services division.

If HBO were to break off and do a stand-alone service they would be giving up those subsidies and would incur huge additional costs in terms of support, billing, and infrastructure that they currently aren’t burdened with. This would make producing the content they produce now – including extremely expensive shows such as Game of Thrones - impossible. At the very least, it would be a huge risk.

Not going to happen. But let’s skip that part too. What I like to focus on is the hypocrisy. Pirates and piracy supporters (sigh) argue that if HBO would just offer this up, then all these people would just start paying HBO for the content. Except, that when its convenient, they make the exact opposite argument. These same proponents argue that Hollywood’s losses are overstated because “not every pirated copy equals a sale.” Not everyone who downloads a song on BitTorrent would have bought that song on iTunes they argue. They are sampling/getting something they wouldn’t actually buy. So, why would this change when it comes to Game of Thrones? No one seems to be able to address this shortcoming. You simply cannot argue both ways.

It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

But what happens if we never lose our past loves?

I am reading the paper, and the bartender—23, maybe?—is updating the other patron on her love life. She’d been seeing a guy, but it fizzled out. He started spending more time with another girl instead, and the bartender didn’t like him quite enough to put herself out there and pursue an exclusive arrangement, so it fizzled out, which has been kind of a bummer. She is explaining to the other patron that one element of the bummer is, because she was linked to guy and his friends on Instagram, she has had an automatic view onto his ongoing life. She could pick up her phone and watch the other girl riding his motorcycle, straddling the bike that she, the bartender, had imagined herself on. The other patron wondered, “What ever happened to the romance of ‘I’m never gonna see you again”?

- Troy Patterson in Slate

Readability is a service that allows you to save web pages to an app, so that you can view them later in a clean format without ads etc. You can also pay them to automatically deliver updates to these pages to your app automatically. The problem Gruber had with it is that this means if you run a website, you are stripped of any ad revenue from viewers who read the page on your website. Readability claims to pay 70% of any money they get from the subscription service they provide to content owners. But, he contends that they aren’t really making it easy to collect that money, but are benefitting from all the goodwill of claiming to.

I pondered more about this because of a comment made by Gruber on his podcast with Dan Benjamin, The Talk Show. He mentioned that if a magazine company were to collect a bunch of different articles from other sources, take just the content but not the ads and then sell it, those sources would be pissed. More than that, I thought, it would be copyright infringement. Copyright law protects content creators by giving them the right to control distribution of their content. Someone else can’t take an essay I write and republish it for profit. Nothing about changing the media from paper to the web changes that.

The key fact here is that when you get a new article in your Readability app, and you share that or go look at it, you are sent to a copy of that article on Readability’s servers, stripped of the ads, to make it easy to read. So, Readability has made a copy, which they host on their own servers.

The pertinent case on this is Perfect 10 v Google. Perfect 10 is a pornography company (side note: porn has a weird amount of intellectual property precedent establishing cases) that sued Google because Google included thumbnails of their images in Google’s image search service. Google would cache copies of the images on their servers to make search results faster. Google was protected largely because they were able to make a Fair Use defense. Namely that they are providing a service in image search that didn’t take away from Perfect 10′s profits.

I believe Readability would not be able to claim this same defense, since they are directly competing with displaying this content with the original content creators. Further, they are affecting the creator’s profits because the ads aren’t being viewed by readers.

This would be very worrisome, and recently Readability changed their software so that when you share a link it goes to the original content instead of the ad-free Readability version.

However, I was discussing this with a colleague, and he brought up that Readability could probably be protected under the DMCA safe habor provisions since users are the ones directing the service to remove the ads. Whether this is true even with subscription services is up for debate.