2019-12-09

Cities & Transportation.

• Dockless bikes as "loitering objects." A reflection on the preferential treatment of bikes (and other physical products) versus people in urban public space. "When things—companies and objects—are prioritized in cities, people are defined relationally as consumers or loiterers instead of citizens."
• Aaron Gordon reviews an experiment in which a cohort of 13 people were given chauffers for a week to model how self-driving cars would change passengers' behavior. The subjects nearly doubled their total travel mileage.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• Matt Stoller on the pivotal role that U.S. government procurement played in winning the Civil War, with a somewhat chilling analysis of how dysfunctional that procurement process has become more recently.
• Cruise lines are expanding their capacity by "stretching" existing ships, cutting them in half and adding rooms to their midsections. This is faster and more cost effective than building new ships from scratch.

Distribution & Logistics.

• A bizarre GPS spoofing epidemic in Shanghai's port, in which thousands of ships appear to be traveling in circles. The source and purpose of the spoofing remain a mystery.
• Anna Wiener tours an Amazon fulfillment center, framing the company's supply chain as an interface that conceals the humans upon which it runs. "Amazon is actually a company full of people, with all their inefficiencies—their bodily needs, their grief, their camaraderie, boredom, humor, and despair. The anonymity to which Amazon shoppers are accustomed is palliative, illusory."
• 90,000 packages are stolen daily in New York City. The growing threat of package theft—in New York and elsewhere—is precipitating a variety of precautionary actions, increasing demand for video doorbell cameras among other things (see also: Vice's series on home surveillance company Ring and its eager collaboration with law enforcement).
• The Amazon effect: Curbside cardboard waste is increasing along with online shopping, while the recycling industry has grown less equipped to handle it.

Maps & Data.

• Oil is the New Data. The partnership between the oil and tech industries, in which oil companies act as perfect customers for cloud providers. "Big Tech isn’t responsible for Kazakhstan’s reliance on oil. Nor can we blame it for the climate catastrophe that we’re facing. But it is certainly exacerbating both."
• Mapping the shadows of New York City.

Tangents.

• "In 2009, Atsushi Tero released a slime mold onto a Petri dish modeled on a map of the Greater Tokyo Area, with bits of food standing in for major urban centers...After a day, it had created a network that was almost identical to Tokyo’s actual rail network."
• SpaceX satellites are interfering with astronomical observations again. While SpaceX currently has 120 satellites in low earth orbit, the FCC has given it permission to launch nearly 12,000, and the company itself plans to launch 30,000 (roughly triple the total number of satellites sent into space by humans to date).
• Chanel's "dystopian data center" motif, with store dummies posed in front of server racks. Originally conceived by Karl Lagerfeld.

Kudzu's mythic rise and fall in the American South