to set a mood • • •
some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
The internet is broken. But we can’t just repair it—we need to rebuild it.
THIN SHELL
Trying to reassemble Mr. Dumpty was always a fool’s errand.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
The internet we know is breaking. And it’s not because of a technical malfunction.
Many of our dreams and expectations about technology providing a free flow of ideas, capital, and information have been met–to a point. But the litany of unintended (née negative) consequences lengthens. Some say we have created a monster that is eroding our system of government, our society, and our economy. And now we’re collectively reacting.
Governments and regulatory bodies—generally with the support of the governed—are using new laws and policies to recalibrate the largest and most important machine ever built by humans. European leaders are legislating privacy, content, and ownership rights much more aggressively, and there is a growing willingness to penalize violators. China has created a more closely governed regional internet with a “Great Firewall” in place to ensure their content is moderated and tracked in a way that works for them (but makes some users in the West uncomfortable). Russia is exploring whether they can also create their own “sovereign” internet.
These actions are primarily driven by two opposing philosophies, neither of which in the extreme serve up a truly healthy future.
- One side is building a digital economy that is pure weaponized capitalism. In this model, your personal “code halo”–the “digital you” created by every click, swipe, buy, like, Tweet, message, post, or follow–is used almost exclusively to disconnect you from your money, your attention, and your vote. In what author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” every bit or byte of our data is monetizable.
- The other side is creating pure Big Brother authoritarianism, where information isn’t used as much for commercial means as it is a means of control. Social credit score systems and monitoring technologies, like those being deployed in many countries (including China), will track individual and corporate behavior and then use it to control access to social services, loans, and other aspects of life.
…
How Facebook is designing for an incoming avalanche of dead users
A new study finds that by 2050, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. Here’s how the company is designing user experiences to face the billions of dead users to come.
By 2050, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. That’s a conservative estimate, according to a study published by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, which aimed to estimate just how many profiles on the platform will belong to people who have died, before the end of the century. Based on projections of Facebook’s number of users growing 13% every year, they calculate that by 2100, there could be more than 4.9 billion dead profiles on the platform.
For Carl Ohman, a graduate student at the Oxford Internet Institute who co-authored the study, the exactness of the numbers is besides the point–more importantly, we need to make decisions as a society, now, about how a private company should handle what will become an unprecedented compilation of human activity. Currently, Facebook says its memorialized profiles–what Facebook calls a dead user’s profile that has officially been converted into an interface for remembering his or her life–number in the hundreds of thousands.
“Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behavior been assembled which spans pretty much every continent, yet all this data is hidden away, controlled by a private company with no insight, no security, and basically no other leading principle than to maximize profit,” Ohman says. “That is problematic from a societal point of view.”
Facebook isn’t the only company that will face a conundrum about what to do with its droves of user data when those users pass on. The challenges facing the company reflect the tech industry’s larger problem with designing for endings–whether it’s the end of a product’s life or the end of a user’s life. More often that not, it’s short-term thinking that drives product decisions, like a smartphone maker deciding to glue its product together to make it thinner and more attractive, but neglecting to think how when that phone breaks and there’s no way to fix it, it will end up contributing to a global e-waste problem. Same with data. While it’s theoretically easier to trash than the heavy metals that go into electronics, tech companies still have trouble with scrubbing user data because their systems simply weren’t designed for deletion. Other companies, which do want to store people’s data forever, haven’t yet grappled with the underlying technical and environmental realities of this storage as more and more people come online. …
Fears grow over ‘food swamps’ as drugstores outsell major grocers
With CVS selling more groceries than Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s combined, researchers fear food ‘deserts’ are becoming ‘swamps’ of processed food.
Los Angeles, California, has some of the worst food ‘swamps’ in the country.
Interspersed among CVS’s glowing fluorescent aisles of laundry detergent, racks of Band-Aids, and over-the-counter digestion remedies, there are shelves of brightly colored cereal boxes. Windowed refrigerators full of milk cartons and microwavable frozen meals for one are within arm’s reach of displays stacked with popcorn, chips and salsa. For the past several years, pharmacies have been quietly stocking and selling more food to Americans who are drawn to one-stop shopping for their everyday essentials.
In 2017, CVS held a 3.9% share of the grocery market. Walgreens came in at 2.4%. That may not seem like much, but it far outpaced both Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, which had 1.4% and 1% respectively. The eyebrow-raising figure probably comes down to an issue of scale – last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations. While the ubiquitous nature of pharmacies may help fill the grocery gap where affordable options are scarce, some researchers are concerned that this low-priced convenience comes with a high cost.
“We don’t hear about drugstore deserts – they are everywhere. But we do hear about grocery deserts,” says Michael Ruhlman, a chef turned author who recently wrote the book Grocery, a deep dive into the industry. “And there is a great irony in that food sold at the pharmacy – ostensibly a place meant to promote our health – is actually bad for you.”
Shelf-stable options tend to be highly processed and high in fat, sodium and sugar. Where they are the easiest option available, communities experience higher rates of chronic illness, like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. …
5 Famous People With Hilariously Awful Military Careers
When you hear that a celebrity spent some time in the military, maybe you think of them serving honorably like in a war drama, or turning the whole system on its ear like in a comedy. But there’s a third category: celebrities who had absolutely no right to be anywhere near the real military at all, like in the Battleship movie. For example …
5. Richard Pryor Spent His Army Years Getting Into Fistfights And Stabbing Dudes
There’s no person in the annals of history who, on reflection, was less suited to a career in the military than Richard Pryor. Pryor served in the Army from 1958 to 1960, and spent much of that time putting on comedy shows and doing as much violence as possible. In the first of two major incidents, Pryor was jumped in the shower by three soldiers armed with tire irons. Instead of taking the beating, he flew into beast mode, grabbed a length of piping, and smacked one of them in the head. His attacker/victim then stumbled back into the arms of his comrades and gave up, awed by Pryor’s show of dominance. “Well damn! You’re alright with me, I’ll tell you that.”
The second incident didn’t end quite as well. A few months after his shower brawl, Pryor and a group of other black soldiers were watching Imitation Of Life, a movie about a black woman whose light-skinned daughter rejects her in order to pass for white. The guys soon noticed that one their white comrades seemed a little too amused by this plot, and so they jumped him after the movie finished. Pryor flew pulled a switchblade and repeatedly stabbed the guy in the back.
The guy refused to go down. Sensing that perhaps he’d stumbled into a Highlander-type situation, Pryor turned and ran, tossing the knife into some nearby bushes. He was soon arrested by MPs after the white guy stormed into the base commander’s office (still wearing his shredded, bloodied fatigues) and demanded justice. Pryor was locked up in military jail for a month before being dishonorably discharged on account of “some silly enlisted man fucking up regulations.” That’s certainly one way to put it. …
This 19th-century pocket watch came with a concealed pistol, a stamp for wax seals, and four poisonous darts
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 23, 2018
Meet the Mastermind Behind the Plywood Cartoons Invading Portland, Oregon
Bigfoot sightings are about to increase dramatically.
Handsome Squidward, the chiseled alter ego of the SpongeBob SquarePants character Squidward Tentacles, enjoyed a day on land.
IF YOU’RE CRUISING AROUND PORTLAND, Oregon, and come across across a six-foot-tall cut-out of Patrick, the pink, portly starfish from SpongeBob SquarePants, chances are good that Mike Bennett left it there for you to find.
For the past few months, Bennett has been busy with plywood, paint, and power tools, speckling his front yard and the city streets with playful, oversized figures. It all started after a snowstorm, when he was noodling over his collection of Calvin and Hobbes books that his parents had recently shipped to him and thinking about a scene where Calvin makes a big snowman. Bennett hadn’t had a front yard in years, and wanted to figure out how to make it fun. What if the delight of some mounded-up snow could last all year, and never run the risk of melting?
Gang’s all here in Bennett’s garage.
He headed to Home Depot, came back with a jigsaw, and went to town on wood from a nearby ReBuilding Center. Bennett, who was once active on the short-video app Vine, where he recreated scenes from movies and TV with little paper dolls, began to fill the yard with pop-culture characters. “Familiar stuff brings more smiles to people’s faces,” he says.
Homer, hanging out in a hedge.
And then he took the show on the road—within reason. “I’m a pretty big baby when it comes to trespassing,” he says, and he’s also careful to avoid damaging property or plants. He’ll sometimes fasten his wooden characters to light posts, trees, or telephone poles with a few hooks and twine. His information is printed on the back of the figures, so if someone gets in touch to say that they want one to come down, he can swing by and grab it. (So far, he says, he hasn’t encountered any issues.) To make it easy to keep an eye on things, he installed them along the routes he tends to follow each day as he drives around for his day job as an assistant for a real estate company. “They’re my babies now,” he says. “I like to check in on them.” …
The Widow Maker of Foul Glamorgan was feudal Ireland’s first supercomputer
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2018
Scientists Save Schrödinger’s Cat
A cat acting out Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. Hope he doesn’t die!
One of the hallmark predictions of quantum mechanics is that particles behave unpredictably—but a new experiment seems to complicate some of those core ideas.
Researchers were able to predict a kind of atomic behavior called a quantum jump and even reverse the jump in a new experiment on an artificial atom. Such research could bring up bigger questions about the nature of physics and could have important implications for improving quantum computers that rely on the rules of quantum mechanics in order to function.
“Our experiment shows that there’s more to the story” of how quantum mechanics works, study author Zlatko Minev, a researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, told Gizmodo.
Quantum mechanics’ core assumption is that on the smallest scales, atomic properties are quantized, meaning that particles take on discrete, rather than continuous states—their properties exist along a staircase rather than a ramp. For example, an electron can be in a lowest-energy state, but if you add a little more energy, it doesn’t slowly transition into the new higher-energy state. Rather, it unpredictably snaps into the new state. If you’re not looking at it, the atom can take on intermediate states—but these aren’t midway points. The atom would be in both states at the same time, and then once you observed it, it would immediately snap into one state or the other.
But researchers wondered if they could predict these jumps and stop them from happening, according to the paper published in Nature. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
John Oliver discusses the medical device industry, which is a huge business with a hugely troubling lack of regulation.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump prefaces his U.K. trip with put-downs toward London’s mayor, then praises pro-Brexit politician Boris Johnson and gets a less-than-presidential welcome from the royals.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Some of the world’s finest nepotism was on display when the British royal family hosted Trump and the U.S. delegation.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
On his last day at the Justice Department, the Special Counsel held a surprise press conference that totally cleared everything up.
入りたいけど入れない。Maru wants to get into the box, but he cannot!
Early Boston’s infamous Hoydens-About-Town Club may have scandalized proper society, but they set the stage for modern feminist literary theory
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2018
FINALLY . . .
To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World’s Worst Sandwich
It was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. It was also inedible.
Three men feast on free lunch in this drawing by Charles Dana Gibson.
NEAR THE END OF THE 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.
Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.
The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.” …
Before he was a famous writer, Charles Dickens was a passionate monster hunter who made it his life’s goal to acquire the head of a Lummagog
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 18, 2018
IN SOLIDARITY
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not. Tomorrow’s a Groundhog Day.