#society (78 links)
- The quiet grief of adult friendship timesofindia.indiatimes.com
- ‘It’s absolutely criminal’: US tipping culture has reached the UK – and is causing chaos theguardian.com
Many of those I speak to think tech has pushed this change forward – and rapidly. The shift away from cash towards card and digital payments is usually framed as removing “friction”, says Prof John Vines, the chair of design informatics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. “It’s about being more convenient. This is all a trend towards making it easier for us to spend our money.” The software in point-of-sale terminals prompts the customer for a tip. “These systems are presented as a way of making giving a tip easier. We don’t have to think about it too much, we don’t have to fiddle with coins and notes. But, really, it’s about encouraging us to spend more.”
- What do you want from AI? - by Carlo Iacono hybridhorizons.substack.com
The 81K study reads less as a report about what people want from AI than as a diagnostic scan of a civilisation that outsourced its care infrastructure, overloaded its workers, defunded its public spaces, and then watched a machine move into every gap it left empty. The respondents are not confused about what they are asking for. They are asking for what was taken from them. That AI is the tool they are asking with, and the tool that threatens to take more, is the entanglement the study maps with clinical precision.
- Did baby boomers eat all the pies? John Lanchester on the truth about the generation gap theguardian.com
It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market
The point here is that the cyberspace close to me is filled with these new, similar people. The people close to me in the real world are pushed away, because, by comparison, they are foreign, alien, strangers.
- What the softening of the Sun says about Britain economist.com
It is this “two-speed liberalisation”, a term coined by Mark Pack, a Liberal Democrat bigwig, that helps explains Britain’s culture wars. It may seem as though the combatants are pulling in opposite directions. But it is better to think of a camel train in the desert: arguments break out when those at the front of the caravan pull ahead of the stragglers.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on the Cities He's Written About, From Washington to Zurich - Bloomberg bloomberg.com
Humans like being together. Here’s the truth: Everybody moves to cities, not just because of their jobs but because of their sociability.
- The good it promises (Part 6: Alice Crary) - Reflective altruism ineffectivealtruismblog.com
EA’s god’s eye image of moral reflection constrains how we can conceive of ethical thought and practice, leaving no room for views intolerant of the idea that…
- Alice Crary · The toxic ideology of longtermism (2023) radicalphilosophy.com
The intellectual movement that calls itself longtermism is an outgrowth of Effective Altruism (EA), a utilitarianism-inspired philanthropic programme founded…
- Pluralistic: Autoenshittification (24 July 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net
Today's links Autoenshittification: How the computer killed capitalism. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications,…
The depressing reality of what has happened here becomes all the more stark when you look across the river. Right opposite the power station stands Churchill Gardens, a vast postwar housing estate designed by distinguished architects Powell and Moya, built to house 5,000 people across a 12-hectare site, with several blocks now listed and around half still council-owned. Built by Westminster City Council, it was designed to accommodate a balanced cross-section of society, with the highest standards of housing for all – and not a segregated entrance in sight.
Some astounding (to me at least) stats.
New research from Ofcom has found that a fifth of three- and four-year-olds now have a phone of their own, and are already using them to watch streaming services, use social media and play games online.
The battle for masculinity is being fought primarily online. In the UK, 91 per cent of 11-year-olds have a phone. Boys aged seven to 16 say they spend more than two hours a day on YouTube.
- Functionalism (international relations) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
Functionalism is a theory of international relations that arose during the interwar period principally from the strong concern about the obsolescence of the state as a form of social organization. Rather than the self-interest of nation states that realists see as a motivating factor, functionalists focus on common interests and needs shared by states (but also by non-state actors) in a process of global integration triggered by the erosion of state sovereignty and the increasing weight of knowledge and hence of scientists and experts in the process of policy-making.
- ‘Updating’ Roald Dahl? It’s the same old story… | David Mitchell theguardian.com
Puffin said they made the changes so that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”. How refreshingly candid. Substitute the word “enjoyed” with “purchased” (a process they’re presumably comfortable with) and we have the truth. There is nothing soft about making these changes at all – it is commercially ruthless.
Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition – as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests – or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.
- The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress worksinprogress.co
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
- Care at Scale cardus.ca
Our social relationships with each other—our culture, our learning, our art, our shared jokes and shared sorrow, raising our children, attending to our elderly, and together dreaming of our future—these are the essence of what it means to be human. We thrive as individuals and communities by caring for others, and being taken care of in turn. Collective infrastructural systems that are resilient, sustainable, and globally equitable provide the means for us to care for each other at scale. They are a commitment to our shared humanity.
- Oikos vs polis: a new (but old) axis on the political map interconnected.org
Being able to say: “aha, that is an example of oikos common cause” has been enormously illuminating to me. It has never been about populism or nationalism, or right and left; those are just symptoms.
- The antidote to civilisational collapse | The Economist economist.com
“It’s ‘fuck off’ to everything,” says Adam Curtis (pictured below), describing public sentiment today. The British documentarist sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a classical journalist whose medium happens to be film.
Lengthy interview with Adam Curtis from late 2018.
- Where everybody knows your name - Messaging services are providing a more private internet | International | The Economist economist.com
Conversations which cause controversy in public can be carried out in private with more nuance and no trolling. A distinction can be made between performance and communication. In “The presentation of Self in Everyday Life” Erving Goffman, a 20th-century sociologist, distinguished between “front-stage” behaviour, which is observed by all and sundry, and the “back-stage” life of rehearsal and preparation in the company of others who are part of the same project. “For healthy psychology we need back and front stage,” says Carissa Véliz of Oxford University. “[Online] we have been pushing back stage more and more into oblivion. Having more private messaging brings the back stage back.”
I really like this analogy.
- The Coronavirus and Our Future | The New Yorker newyorker.com
That gets your attention: death, all too possible! But to have that feeling in your ordinary, daily life, at home, stretched out over weeks—that’s too strange to hold on to. You partly get used to it, but not entirely. This mixture of dread and apprehension and normality is the sensation of plague on the loose. It could be part of our new structure of feeling, too.
- How a cash-strapped generation fell for the fantasy world of the Modern House | Art and design | The Guardian theguardian.com
The great escapism ... a Modern House-marketed property in Twickenham, west London.Photograph: The Modern House T he Drive curves quietly through the green of…
The citizen network is a coalition of people working to re-imagine the city as a place for people to live in, one of social justice and equality, not just a space for consumption and profit.
- The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives newyorker.com
By dragging icons on a screen, supply-chain managers schedule factory work down to the second. Illustration by George Wylesol This past December, the…
- How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation buzzfeednews.com
I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.…
- The Way American Parents Think About Chores Is Bizarre theatlantic.com
Constance Bannister Corp / Getty The practice of paying children an allowance kicked off in earnest about 100 years ago. “The motivation was twofold,” says…
The proposed development for Leith Walk.Photograph: Drum Property Group Like most ports, Leith has always been a place of change – and never more so than over…
Illustration by Ben Wiseman. In the heart of San Francisco, the gig economy reigns supreme. Walk intoa grocery store, and a large number of shoppers you see are…
- Canary Wharf: life in the shadow of the towers | Jane Martinson theguardian.com
T he house I lived in, growing up on London’s Isle of Dogs, was beside a huge gate and high walls – impenetrable barriers even to the naughty kids who wanted to…
- On Weaponised Design - Our Data Our Selves ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org
“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for…
Adapted from “We Are The Very Model Of Modern Humanist Technologists”, a lightning talk given at # foocamp 2017 in San Francisco on Saturday, November 4th,…
Internet Around the world, a handful of visionaries are plotting an alternative online future. Is it really possible to remake the internet in a way that’s…
- How the Rohingya Escaped nytimes.com
Start Myanmar says the story of these people is “fake news.” The military says they burned down their own villages, faked massacres, left their own children for…
- Generation Screwed highline.huffingtonpost.com
WHOA! Show me the (slightly less cool) mobile version instead. Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the…
I n early 1984, executives at the telephone company Pacific Bell made a fateful decision. For decades, the company had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on telephone…
B ig Tech is broken. Suddenly, a wide range of journalists and politicians agree on this. For decades, most of the media and political establishment accepted…
André Staltz The Web began dying in 2014, here's how 30 Oct 2017 Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there…
Illustration by Amanda Wray Robots are hiding in plain sight. It’s time we stop ignoring them. There’s a chart I came across earlier this year, and not only…
Sick Systems How to Keep Someone With You Forever So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could…
At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’…
- The Overprotected Kid theatlantic.com
A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and…
- If children want to run free, let them | Patrick Barkham theguardian.com
‘Britain’s child happiness statistics are pretty dire. Poverty and overworked parents must be part of it, but so are consumerism and a loss of past…
- The Like Button Ruined the Internet theatlantic.com
Here’s a little parable. A friend of mine was so enamored of Google Reader that he built a clone when it died. It was just like the original, except that you…
As a sustainable lifestyle blogger, my job is to make conscious consumerism look good. Over the course of four years Instagramming eco-friendly outfits, testing…
Trains sit idle at Selhurst depot during a strike by Southern Railway staff on 13 December.Photograph: Kirsty O'Connor/PA The Southern rail staff handing out…