Thought Shrapnel

🌱 From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised

💰 Should Employers Cut Your Salary If You Change Cities?

🏂 Friluftsliv, the Norwegian Concept of Outdoor Living

🐟 A whopping 91% of plastic isn't recycled

🤯 F1 Pit Stop In 2-Seconds: An In-Depth Analysis

Quotation-as-title by Richard Koch. Image from top-linked post.

Adrian Daub, a professor of literature, takes issue with the tech sector's focus on disruption:

Most of the discourse around disruption clearly draws on the idea of creative destruction, but it shifts it in important respects. It doesn’t seem to suggest that ever-intensifying creative destruction will eventually lead to a new stability – that hyper-capitalism almost inevitably pushes us toward something beyond capitalism. Instead, disruption seems to suggest that the instability that comes with capitalism is all there is and can be – we might as well strap in for the ride. Ultimately, then, disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness. Revolution for people who don’t stand to gain anything by revolution.

Indeed, there is an odd tension in the concept of disruption: it suggests a thorough disrespect towards whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists. Disruption is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never ever wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical, but its effects never really upset the apple cart: Uber claims to have “revolutionised” the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has largely stayed the same. What it managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions and anyone other than Uber making money on the whole enterprise.

Adrian Daub, The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense (The Guardian)

Venture-capital backed tech companies providing profits through (what I call) 'software with shareholders' fracture our societies, destroy our communities, and enrich the privileged.

Wise words from Seth Godin:

Universities and local schools are in crisis with testing in disarray and distant learning ineffective…

[When can we talk about what school is for?]

It’s comfortable to ignore the system, to assume it is as permanent as the water surrounding your goldfish. But the fact that we have these tactical problems is all the evidence we need to see that something is causing them, and that spending time on the underlying structure could make a difference.

Seth Godin, When can we talk about our systems?

It's not just education, or racism, or healthcare, or any of the other things he lists. Organisations are made up of people, and most people don't like conflict.

As a result, we get a constant barrage of tactical responses to emergent situations, rather than focusing on strategies that would prevent them.

The more time we spend on purposeful reflection, the less time we spend putting out fires.

🎨 The Opposite Of ‘Crappy Design’

🙄 In Convenience We Trust

😳 How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole

🤯 The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite

👍 Non-Boring Zoom Breakout Groups

Quotation-as-title from Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.

We've had some pretty bad governments in the UK during my lifetime, but has any been so underqualified, so inept, corrupt, and nepotistic as our current one? It would be bad enough in regular times, but during a pandemic it's a tragedy.

Who knew that children go to school in September? Who guessed that hundreds of thousands of students head to universities where they – and easily shocked readers should look away – strive with every fibre of their being to mingle with each other as vigorously as they can? What clairvoyant might have predicted that, when the government offered the public cut-price restaurant meals at the taxpayers’ expense, the public would gobble them up? Or that, when the prime minister urged workers to go back to their offices and save Pret a Manger, a few brave souls would have returned to their desks and risked having “dulce et decorum est pro Pretia mori” carved on their gravestones?

Nick Cohen, The meritocracy has had its day. How else to explain the rise of Dido Harding? (The Observer)

Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras (The Verge)

In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”

Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World (The New York Times)

Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow.

Kim Kardashian West joins Facebook and Instagram boycott (BBC News)

I can't sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation - created by groups to sow division and split America apart,” Kardashian West said.

Quotation-as-title from Dr Johnson.

I found this via Mastodon and immediately had to post it here. I'm not sure about the original artist, but it struck me as capturing our current moment rather well.

Referencing a recent article in The New York Times, and using a metaphor from his honeymoon in Cancun, Purism's Chief Security Officer raises some important questions about the closed/open future of technology:

Think about the future of computers over the next fifty years. Computers will become even more ubiquitous, not just embedded in all of the things around us, but embedded inside us. With advances in neural-computer interfaces, there is a high likelihood that we will be connecting computers directly to our brains within our lifetimes. Which tech company would you trust to control your neural implant?

If a computer can read and write directly to your brain, does it change how you feel about vendors controlling which software you can use or whether you can see the code? Does it change how you feel about vendors subsidizing hardware and software with ads or selling data they access through your computer? Does it change how you feel about government regulation of technology?

Kyle Rankin, Tourists on Tech's Toll Roads

This article primarily focuses on racism and intolerance to gender differences, but even as a "white, male... heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, wealthy, and educated" man, I recognise some of what it describes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened much of our workforce to a new surge of microaggressions by making coworkers as unwelcome guests in their homes through video meetings. Bosses and coworkers can see our families and furniture. They can hear the background noise from our neighborhoods. They see us with our hair, faces, and clothes less put together than usual due to the closure of the shops and salons that help us assimilate into the mainstream world.

Sarah Morgan, How microaggressions look different when we’re working remotely (Fast Company)

There's a line, I think between friendly banter and curiosity and, for example, being reminded on a daily basis that I'm getting ever more grey, that I'm looking tired, and my forehead is shinier than a billiard ball.

Microaggressions? Perhaps. But on days when I'm not feeling 100%, it sure does grind me down.

🐱 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020 finalists revealed

😂 Extinction Rebellion 'go floppy' when arrested, complains senior Met officer

😮 Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius, Panama regulator says

🤘 Barbados revives plan to remove Queen as head of state and become a republic

🛂 When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number

Quotation-as-title by Gary Snyder. Image from top-linked post.

My go-to explanation of acceptable political opinions is usually the Overton Window, but this week I came across Hallin's spheres:

Hallin's spheres is a theory of media objectivity posited by journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin in his book The Uncensored War to explain the coverage of the Vietnam war. Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

Wikipedia

I think the interesting thing right now for either theory is that most people have their news filtered by social networks. As a result, it's not (just) journalists doing the filtering, but people in affinity groups.

This image, from Grayson Perry, is incredible. As he points out in the accompanying article, he's chosen the US due to an upcoming series of his, but geographically this could be anywhere, as culture wars these days happen mainly online.

I've added the emphasis in the quotation below:

When we experience a background hum of unfocused emotion, be it anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, we unconsciously look for something to attach it to. Social media is brilliant at supplying us with issues to which attach our free-floating feelings. We often look for nice, preformed boxes into which we can dump our inchoate feelings, we crave certainty. Social media constantly offers up neat solutions for our messy feelings, whether it be God, guns, Greta or gender identity.

In a battle-torn landscape governed by zeroes and ones, nuance, compromise and empathy are the first casualties. If I were to sum up the online culture war in one word it would be “diaphobia”, a term coined by the psychiatrist RD Laing meaning “fear of being influenced by other people”, the opposite of dialogue. Our ever-present underlying historical and enculturated emotions will nudge us to cherrypick and polish the nuggets of information that support a stance that may have been in our bodies from childhood. Once we have taken sides, the algorithms will supply us with a stream of content to entrench and confirm our beliefs.

Grayson Perry, Be it on God, guns or Greta, social media offers neat solutions for our messy feelings (The Guardian)

A few years ago I read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is even better than people say. I was reminded of this quotation via Oliver Burkeman's Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life... perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

🧠 Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos

😫 ‘Ugh fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task

👍 The Craft of Teaching Confidence

🏝️ Log on, chill out: holiday resorts lure remote workers to fill gap left by tourists

🎧 Producer 9th Wonder on Producing Beats for Kendrick Lamar

Quotation-as-title by Albert Camus. Image from top-linked article.

This NPR article about the oil industry's cynical manipulation of us when it comes to recycling plastic blew my mind 🤯

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

Laura Sullivan, How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)

Now that China isn't accepting the world's plastic for 'recycling' (i.e. landfill) domestic initiatives have a problem.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

Laura Sullivan, How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)

The world really is monumentally screwed every which way at the moment. And I feel like an absolute chump for being in any way enthusiastic about at-home recycling.

One way of thinking about the pandemic is as inevitable, and just one of a series of life-changing events that will happen to you during your time on earth.

Whereas some people seem to think that life should be trouble- and pain-free, it's clear by even a cursory glance at history that this an impossible expectation.

This article is a useful one for reframing the pandemic as a change that we're literally all going through together, but which will affect us differently:

Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones—what Feiler calls “lifequakes”—happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.

Arthur C. Brooks, The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes (The Atlantic)

💬 Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit

📚 The Best Self-Help Books of the 21st Century

💊 A radical prescription to make work fit for the future

💰 How To Hide A Billion Dollars: Three Techniques The Ultrarich Use To Dodge Ex-Spouses, The Taxman And Disgruntled Business Partners

👣 This desolate English path has killed more than 100 people

Quotation-as-title by Josh Billings. Image from top linked post.

I listened to this episode of The Art of Manliness podcast a while back on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found it excellent. I've discussed ACT with my CBT therapist who says it can also be a useful approach.

My guest today says we need to free ourselves from these instincts and our default mental programming and learn to just sit with our thoughts, and even turn towards those which hurt the most. His name is Steven Hayes and he’s a professor of psychology, the founder of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the author of over 40 books, including his latest 'A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters'. Steven and I spend the first part of our conversation in a very interesting discussion as to why traditional interventions for depression and anxiety — drugs and talk therapy — aren’t very effective in helping people get their minds right, and how ACT takes a different approach to achieving mental health. We then discuss the six skills of psychological flexibility that undergird ACT and how these skills can be used not only by those dealing with depression and anxiety but by anyone who wants to get out of their own way and show up and move forward in every area of their lives.

Something that Hayes says is that "if people don't know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values". This, he says, is why rich people can still be unfulfilled.

Well worth a listen.

I've been skeptical about the motives of philanthropic organisations for a while now. This article in The Guardian is a long read, but worth it.

Here's an excerpt:

The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich – and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.

The role of private philanthropy in international life has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s 260,000 philanthropy foundations have been established in that time, and between them they control more than $1.5tn. The biggest givers are in the US, and the UK comes second. The scale of this giving is enormous. The Gates Foundation alone gave £5bn in 2018 – more than the foreign aid budget of the vast majority of countries.

Philanthropy is always an expression of power. Giving often depends on the personal whims of super-rich individuals. Sometimes these coincide with the priorities of society, but at other times they contradict or undermine them. Increasingly, questions have begun to be raised about the impact these mega-donations are having upon the priorities of society.