Getting Cities Our of Cars. Copyright Horror. Intelligences. Bogost. Malaise Self-Care. Civic Futures. Turing.

Build the Cities of the Future, Get Out of Cars

Long read (24 min) at National Geographic with quite a few pictures, although… not necessarily about the projects they talk about in the piece?? Anyway, the China and its Emerald Cities planning especially drew my attention. The other cities and projects are also interesting but perhaps already covered more widely. Basically: new cities being planned at a more human less car-oriented scale; reinventing suburbs by re-using malls as “downtowns” (!!); densification along old roads and train tracks; build housing and street level shops.

[C]ities would stop expanding so voraciously, paving over the nature around them; instead they’d find better ways of letting nature into their cores, where it can touch people. They’d grow in dense clusters and small, walkable blocks around a web of rapid transit. […]

It’s one many urban planners are terrified of: driverless autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Calthorpe himself thinks that, if AVs are left to individuals or the likes of Uber or Lyft, they will metastasize sprawl. He wants to harness the technology to benefit communities. […]

In 2016 the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, the highest organs of the state, issued a decree: From now on Chinese cities were to preserve farmland and their own heritage; have smaller, unfenced blocks and narrower, pedestrian-friendly streets; develop around public transit; and so on. In 2017 the guidelines were translated into a manual for Chinese planners called Emerald Cities. […]

Where the Eastside Trail crosses Ponce de Leon Avenue, for example, a giant old Sears, Roebuck warehouse has become the Ponce City Market, a food hall, mall, and office complex. A Ford factory that once made Model T’s is now loft apartments. […]

We didn’t have to go completely nuts about cars, allowing them to become the tail that wagged the urban dog. We didn’t have to rip up all the streetcar lines. We didn’t have to forget that cities are for people—and we don’t need to do it again.

EU Copyright Directive Holds Online Hosts Liable for User Infringement

This week in “policy makers hardly ever take decisions in the public’s interest and just listen to lobbyists.” Horrible, horrible EU directive goes through. Just as voices start rising to restrain or even dismantle large platforms, a decision which will be very hard to implement by smaller players, handicapping them.

“Despite the warnings and concerns of academics, privacy bodies, U.N. representatives and hundreds of thousands of consumers across Europe, the European Parliament has given its go-ahead to a very unbalanced copyright law,” said Monique Goyens, director general of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC.) “Consumers will have to bear the consequences of this decision. Their concerns had been voiced loud and clearly but MEPs chose to ignore them.”

Life Rewired Reads

James Bridle on AI, Go, humans being passed in certain forms of intelligence and how as we consider intelligences we create, we should also consider those already around us, from octopuses to 80,000 year-old interconnected root systems.

A new Copernican trauma looms, wherein we find ourselves standing upon a ruined planet, not smart enough to save ourselves, and no longer by any stretch of the imagination the smartest ones around. Any appeal to survival will have to be made both to technology and other non-human intelligences, and it will be possible only if we are prepared to accept the toy intelligences we’re building not as yet more indications of our own superiority, but as intimations of our ultimate interdependence, and as calls to humility and care.

No.73 Asides

• Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award. “In 2004, with less than $400,000 in funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Dr. Hinton created a research program dedicated to what he called “neural computation and adaptive perception.” He invited Dr. Bengio and Dr. LeCun to join him.” As noted by Matthieu Dugal and others, this wouldn’t have happened without Canadian support for fundamental research: How Canada has emerged as a leader in artificial intelligence.
• 🧵 by Deb Chachra on Twitter. She’s writing a book about infrastructures and tweeted this excellent list of readings: If you’re interested in this topic, here are some pointers to readings and people in this space.”
• 🍄 The Worst Disease Ever Recorded. “For wildlife diseases, all the world is once again a single connected mass, easily traversed. For that reason, new fungal diseases seem to be emerging at an ever-increasing pace, affecting bats, snakes, salamanders, and more.”
• 🧵 by Fonda Lee on Twitter, about writing books but good for other creative pursuits: ✏️ “The one consistently reliable way to overcome “writer’s block” is to lower your standards. I mean really lower them. Already low, you say? GO LOWER. E.g: what I’m writing now can’t even be called First Draft. It’s a Zero Draft. You know what, let’s call it Negative Draft. (1/?)”
• 🧵 by Zoë Schlanger on Twitter with some of the great fragility around our water resources: “One thing that blows my mind about all this: Humans exist on an insanely short leash. A person can last around three days without drinking water. We are absurdly fragile that way; plenty of other organisms can go far longer. Just think how long your houseplant”
• ⚡️💨 Battery Power’s Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas. “the benchmark levelized cost of electricity,[1] or LCOE, for lithium-ion batteries has fallen 35% to $187 per megawatt-hour since the first half of 2018. Meanwhile, the benchmark LCOE for offshore wind has tumbled by 24%.”
• 🚙 Volvo Putting Cameras In All Cars to Combat Distraction and Drunk Driving. “The brand says human behaviors are the most pressing current safety issues, namely speeding, distraction, and intoxication.” [“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t let you drive that Volvo.”]
• 🏝 The history and mystery of Polynesian navigation. “[W]hat’s known about what might be humanity’s most epic migration, and what questions remain. She also explores the investigation itself, how different times and changing Western assumptions colored the inquiries into native peoples’ abilities and their past, and how sometimes the right questions were asked, even though the tools didn’t yet exist to answer them.”

The Mueller Investigation Ends, Along With Its Industry

By Ian Bogost, although it’s framed around the investigation, it’s included here for the view on news being more and more anticipation of the future instead of coverage of the present, and media jockeying for position by taking anticipated conclusions for granted.

It’s more than yet another fusion of 24-hour information, meme culture, and internet opportunism. It also speaks to Americans’ strong desire to anticipate the future, and to live in the present as if that future has already arrived, and in the way they’d planned it to besides. […]

These and other stories seem like news about the present, but they are really speculations on information from the future. […]

So much media is premediated now, it’s almost impossible to find something whose payload isn’t partly composed of practice for future events. […]

Like taking out a loan on news to come in the hopes that its benefit will pay out enough to cover its costs, the Mueller disciples traded their own anticipatory media on margin, assuming that their winnings would more than pay off their debts.

Why “Doing Nothing” Is the Best Self-Care for the Internet Era

Not as strong as some of the early shares implied but useful to keep in mind for this view of the culprits of our modern malaise.

In her eyes, there are two primary culprits responsible for our modern malaise: social media and the cult of productivity. The former robs us of attention, foments hysteria and anxiety, and collapses context (“keeping us trapped in a fearful present”). The latter dictates that any surplus time we do have be used “productively,” driven towards some end goal or task. […]

[W]ithdraw your attention from social media and reroute it into more meditative pursuits that allow us to deepen our capacity for focus, connection, and curiosity.