Things I Like
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These are amazing, really, click the link, go look at it.
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And technology can feel miraculous. The application of knowledge and available materials to create new tools allows us to continually rework the world for our needs. We find gaps in our abilities and we make things that fill those gaps. We then look for more gaps. More opportunities. More frustrations. We keep building. We circle back and find that our previous gap-filling technologies had significant consequences and so we find better ways to fill the gaps. In theory we improve our lives.
This is really great and Winston has done great work on accessibility at Vox. And it's a pleasure to read more about what Winston has thought about in regards to it. We all could need affordances at some point in our lives, and it's very easy to forget that.
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This is a really great comic and it speaks to me a lot where I am right now in life. I'm spending August working on a few different things related to my health and feeling better and one of them is drinking. So I've cut way back on how much I consume. I also am on the hunt for interesting drink recipes, because if I'm going to drink a lot less, I want it to be delicious and deliberate. So when out with friends, if I order a drink, I sip it and take time with it. But I find that I prefer to have my limited amount at home, enjoying it with G, and time on the porch (in winter that'll be in front of the fire).
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The more salient point is that they are also forcing their neighbors to make that choice by turning the neighborhood into a commodity as well. The host has forced their neighbors — who see strangers coming and going constantly — to become just a little bit less engaged and connected to their home. It’s not just that they aren’t benefiting financially, it’s that they are incurring the majority of the social costs and losing what they thought their home was when they moved in. Maybe the Airbnb renter is okay with being in a cheaper “hotel,” but their neighbors didn’t sign a lease to live in any kind of hotel.
I'm not a fan of AirBnB and I think this article points out really well how the use of an apartment for full time rental disrupts and changes a neighborhood. There is a lot of things that come along with this and many times it is the neighbors who pay a hidden price while just trying to live their lives in the place they've chosen to do so.
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The distinction’s relevance persists today. Large areas of “real America” are almost entirely white. In Appalachia, that homogeneity, along with the region’s populist tradition, helps explain why white voters there took so much longer to flip from Democrat to Republican than in the Deep South. This does not mean that racism is absent in these areas—far from it. But it suggests that the racism is fueled as much by suspicion of the “other” as it is by firsthand experience of blacks and competition with them—and that political sentiment on issues such as welfare and crime isn’t as racially motivated as many liberal analysts assume. A focus on the South also eclipses places where low-income whites consist mainly of descendants of later European immigrants. (Think of the South Boston Irish, or Baltimore’s Polish American dockworkers depicted in the second season of The Wire.)
This election year in the US has brought out a lot of anger of certain folks who are feeling left behind. And the angry working class white voter is talked about more than almost any other. This piece is really fantastic, drawing on two different books written about the subject of poor whites, but from very different perspectives. I learned a lot and it made me want to read more on the subject.
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Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. In many ways, it remains the primal vehicle. A person who has spoken English most of her life is always going to speak English when she stubs her toe (or, according to spycraft, at the moment of orgasm). But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents. People are more likely to say they’d push a man off a bridge—in order to save five other people about to be hit by a train—when the dilemma is presented in their second language.
A really lovely piece about language, love, and communication. I speak a second language and I related to a lot of the bits and pieces that she talked about as she was learning. If you like language, this is well worth reading.
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I know this much: I don’t want to be a part of a community like Twitter if the previous offenses are an accepted part of that community. Twitter isn’t a country, it’s a service. And as a store gets to decide what products it sells, services decide what is and is not permissible. Twitter finds a lot of horrible things permissible, is what I’m saying, and it doesn’t want you to be able to filter or curate your experience. They want to sell you shit. They sure as hell don’t want to behave as responsible community arbiters. It doesn’t want to protect its users or act with any kind of moral authority lest they be judged for daring to not permit everything under the guise of consequence-free first amendment protection.
This is from 2014 and Fraction nails it. Still so true.
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After settling this question, we all moved on to bemoaning the strange tendency of the younger lefty generation to censor or silence speech or opinions they consider in some way wrong: no-platforming, safe spaces, and the rest of it. We were all right about that, too. But then, from the corner, on a sofa, the cleverest among us, who was at that moment feeding a new baby, waited till we’d all stopped bloviating and added: “Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”
Really interesting piece on Brexit and the vote. There are lessons here for Americans with what is going on in our current election.
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When we take a “gut feeling” sense of someone’s seniority without specific criteria, there is basically no way to counteract our own biases, but we still make a judgement. It’s completely possible for a person applying to multiple dev jobs to be evaluated as junior at one, mid-level at another, and even senior at another, with very little feedback as to why.
I really like the way this is defined and talked about. Job titles, in particular when you are senior or not, are a difficult thing and the proposed way to define them here is really interesting.
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The “dumbbell” design was conceived to give each tenant its own floor and create an entrance and outdoor common area sheltered from the busy intersection. The result allows for retail space on the ground floors and 10 floors of office space, each 4,000 square feet, which he said was ideal for a 12- to 15-person company. The building is 44 percent preleased as of late last year. Mr. Cavenaugh reserved one floor of the building for co-working space that his company will manage; this will be his third co-working space in Portland.
This building, as you'll see if you click through to see the rendering, has been controversial, to say the least. People either love it or hate it. But that is exactly why I like it. Great buildings often are controversial when built. In addition, the developer is a super interesting guy who does non traditional projects, but his projects are successful (as defined by being fully leased out). He spoke at the Portland Creative Mornings and I recommend that talk as well.
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That tech (and, increasingly, media—and oh, that boundary is nothing if not fluid) also speaks of scalability in religious terms puts Tsing’s contention here in an even more interesting light. Scalability is expressed not only in the external artifacts of an organization—the software, the servers, the business model—but also the people who work for it and the people who interact with it as customers, clients, and, increasingly, inconstant laborers. That latter category—the Uber drivers, TaskRabbits, and Postmates—seems especially relevant to notions of scalability. Uber can scale, but the single parent who works as a driver and can’t predict what they’ll make from week to week cannot.
The book, The Mushroom at the End of the World has now moved up on my reading list. I want to finish what I have started and then it will get to the top. But the way Mandy talks about tech in relation to scale and the questions we should be asking about it are interesting and I think vital. If scale, as she says at the end of this piece, is the solitary success metric, there are problems. Because when you scale what do you lose? What do you leave behind? And how does scale affect people?
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We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology " at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers -- as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...
I love Le Guin and it's my dream to bump into her on the bus someday here in Portland.
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But it’s rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself. Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale.
This is a long piece, but very well thought out. We in tech have a problem with thinking that tech alone can solve all the problems of the world. But in actuality it is just one piece of the puzzle and Zuckerman does a good job of showing how that could possibly work.
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The first step towards a better tech economy is humility and recognition of limits. It's time to hold technology politically accountable for its promises. I am very suspicious of attempts to change the world that can't first work on a local scale. If after decades we can't improve quality of life in places where the tech élite actually lives, why would we possibly make life better anywhere else?
As usual Maciej has made me think. I agree with a lot of the points in here, but I also think that there are counter arguments to be made, that there is more gray than this piece alludes to. And I thank Cennydd for helping me see that.
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But whenever that impulse returns, that impulse to come on now be serious, I lose the magic again. It happened most recently getting ready for my upcoming art show. That stupid voice started saying: This is a gallery show. This is Art. I need to be serious.
This is a really huge reason that my drawing right now is still just for me, just in a sketchbook and I share crappy iPad photos of it on Flickr. I feel like making it more would make it tighten up and it would lose the magic for me.