“The crowded bazaar” is, Mr. Grau and Dr. Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office conclude, a recipe for “combat in hell.”
And thus it is that the U.S. military hires Afghan-American civilians to pretend to sell plastic bread and meat on the streets of a shipping container village in California, in order to prepare its forces to successfully navigate the urban inferno.
via Edible Geography
Isn’t it funny how all these attempts to make a better world turn out to be ways of making a more expedient workforce? What are Special Economic Zones and their Charter City children if not playgrounds for economic experimentation? What is the history of globalization if not the history of corporations setting up operations in territories that offer them unregulated freedom to innovate on their production practices? I hear they are doing wonderful cutting-edge work in Bangladesh around high density rapid-construction factory architecture, even if it is occasionally catastrophically buggy. How come the innovations are all crushingly, depressingly the same? We’ve thoroughly innovated in the area of long hours, harsh work conditions, abridged employee rights, and poor safety standards. Maybe it’s time to try something else. Where are the SEZs that are collectivist utopias? Where are the SEZs that abolish paid work altogether? Why isn’t there a matriarchal SEZ? If we’re going to have Farsight Reservations, surely we can do better.
— A Utopia of One’s Own - Medium
“DELIVERY workers tramp through tunnels under Gaza — carrying bags and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The famous fast food has gone underground as Palestinians order the takeaways from Egypt.
Boxes and bags emblazoned with Colonel Sanders famous red and white logo move swiftly through the smuggling tunnels that run beneath the border.
The fried food has to make its subterranean journey across as there is no KFC restaurant in the Palestinian region.
Israeli restrictions on Gaza crossings make it difficult to open an international fast food branch in the area.”
The ISS crew wasn’t shy about explaining its reasons for switching. There are “dozens of laptops” on the space station, some of which are already running various versions of Linux, like RedHat and Scientific Linux. In recent years, every single one of those laptops that runs Windows has gotten a virus at one point or another.
— The International Space Station Is Abandoning Windows for Linux | Motherboard - Imagine a Stuxnet variant for the ISS (via iamdanw)
I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,” but instead I’m going to propose a new term, status flight, to describe what happens when elites abandon a status symbol that’s lost its signifying power after becoming too quotidian and ubiquitous. This isn’t to say there aren’t some real “white flight”-type elements here; accessing the Internet via mobile phone is more common for Black and Latina/o usersthan for white users, for instance, and it’s no coincidence that the first Glass-related Tumblr I saw was White Men Wearing Google Glass. (There’s now a Black Men Wearing Google GlassTumblr too, though as I write this, it features only one picture of one man; White Men Wearing Google Glass presently has 27 pictures, though Sergey Brin appears more than once.) At the same time, I worry about extending boyd’s “white flight” metaphor too far; I also want to capture the simultaneous race, gender, and class dynamics that feed into this phenomenon. While class dynamics are a part of what boyd describes in her paper, this seemed to be lost on some readers of my App.net piece—so though I’m ambivalent about using a new term, I thought I’d test this one out. Status flight therefore describes when people of higher status (in this case, privileged white technophile men) dissociate themselves from something that has become too closely associated with people of lower status (in this case, pretty much everyone else).
There are plenty of people out there, I’m sure, who will see the digirati’s enthusiasm for Google Glass as plain old Brand New Gadget Fetishization, nothing more. But technology isn’t neutral, and neither is its fetishization; Google Glass is no exception.
Many times I have been asked this question: How do archaeologists find the ancient cities? The should rather be: How can one who is not absolutely blind have any trouble whatsoever in choosing the right spot? Cities are all around.Every mound of dirt is a city. I have yet to find a place in the land of Iraq, except in the newly formed delta, on which one can stand and not see two or three cities outlined on the horizon. - Edward Chiera (They wrote on clay,1938)
- via Cryptoforestry
This winter, we, Olivia Rosane and Adam Rothstein had a conversation about drones. We didn’t start the conversation; we were responding to a growing murmur of voices asking what it meant that flying killer robots were now very much a part of our world and how we should respond.
What we insisted…
The Great Osage Trail: Buffalo migration route becomes Indian trail, then settlers trail, then American highway.
