#society (51 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.
- China’s Age of Malaise newyorker.com
- 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 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
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
- The Citizen Network reimaginingthecity.scot
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.
- Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy? markmanson.net
<blockquote>In the attention economy, people are rewarded for extremism. They are rewarded for indulging their worst biases and stoking other people’s worst fears. They are rewarded for portraying the world as a place that is burning to the ground, whether it’s because of gay marriage, or police violence, or Islamic terrorism, or low interest rates. The internet has generated a platform where apocalyptic beliefs are celebrated and spread, and moderation and reason is something that becomes too arduous and boring to stand.</blockquote>
- The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman theguardian.com
<blockquote>So we need supermarkets. The problem is, we really don’t need the kind of supermarkets we’ve got. By giving too small a set of companies a free run at too much of the retail food economy, we have put at risk our future food security. We used to be well over 70% self-sufficient in food in the UK. Now it’s below 60%, and when you look at the proportion of food we consume that’s produced here, it’s 50%.</blockquote>
- The hidden costs of renting in modern Britain opendemocracy.net
- Tech's tunnel vision (Phil Gyford’s website) gyford.com
<blockquote>Trying to imagine a tech conference that would embody an alternative viewpoint — a more “socialist / social democratic” alternative — actually seems like a good way in. I don’t have to imagine a whole new society and economic model, but only try to imagine what kinds of topics might be talked about at a conference along those lines. Some topics I quickly wrote down...</blockquote>
<blockquote>Ultimately, MOOCs are not by themselves a mechanism for development but require certain levels of education and technology. They are reaching millions of people around the world, but to truly revolutionise access, improvements in the broader education and technology ecosystem are vital.</blockquote>
<blockquote>I think there is an equally diffuse malaise today - waiting for a new kind of journalism to bring it into focus. Like with McClure's it won't be just a catalogue of shocking facts - it will be an imaginative leap that pulls all the scandals together and shows how they are part of some new system of power that we don't fully comprehend.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Thatcherism left Britain politically, economically and regionally divided, a state that was meant to be proud that it stood for something in the world again, even as Thatcherism warned that the state was the enemy of freedom and not to be relied upon. No one could bring in change of the shape, speed and size that Thatcher did, and not expect any flaws or problems to emerge. To say that she's responsible for the country's recent triumphs, but not for any of its woes, defies all logic.</blockquote>
- The New Atlantis » The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks thenewatlantis.com
- The Power of Proxy Activism davidbrin.com
<blockquote>Proxy Power is the uniquely convenient -- but seldom discussed -- ability of a modern person to participate in activism... helping to change or improve the world... by the simple expedience of joining some group that is vigorously pursuing that part of your personal agenda. In other words, you add both your membership dues and the political impact of your membership, in order to get behind people who are striving to save the world for you.</blockquote>
A beginning, not an end.
- Ross Andersen – Humanity's deep future aeonmagazine.com
<blockquote>‘I am finding it increasingly plausible that existential risk is the biggest moral issue in the world,’ he told me. ‘Even if it hasn’t gone mainstream yet.’</blockquote>
- Ken MacLeod – Socialism and transhumanism aeonmagazine.com
- The Best | Dustin Curtis dcurt.is
<blockquote>It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed to please everyone.</blockquote>
- America the Anxious - NYTimes.com opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
While the British way can be drainingly negative, The American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.
- Why the super-rich love the UK | Society | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
- Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson theparisreview.org
IfYouOnly: The people behind TV show The Wire explain why they are waging a war against the war on drugs: http://is.gd/AB9fvx (@TIME, 2008)
- Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups « jolieodell.wordpress.com
I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set. And for my good friends at several of the aforementioned startups, I challenge you to find a way to solve a social or human problem with your app.
Enables social entrepreneurs, socially-minded people and socially-driven organisations to share, shape and use social insight to generate greater positive impact in the real world.
Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it.
- Change.org change.org
A social network for hundreds of social causes and over 1 million nonprofit organizations.