#15: 5 Persia Ave
The joke that rich people and poor people share certain habits and behaviors, at least superficially, has become less of a joke and more of a strange reality as we get deeper into the 21st century. The internet has relieved us of so much physical baggage that the affluent and destitute can both be found floating along nomadically and minimally on clouds of free information—the former because they can and the latter because they have to. Bruce Sterling called it Favela Chic: when you've lost everything you had but are really big on Facebook.
The San Francisco Fire Department recently cleared out a laundromat basement that had been housing more than 20 residents in makeshift rooms for as long as a decade. The basement, which had the unofficial address 5 Persia Ave. (not on the map), is a particularly jarring indicator of the Bay Area's severe inequality. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, the city shut down an illegal rooftop Airbnb consisting of five small rooms built on top of a manufacturing building, proceeding to fine the owner heavily.
The San Francisco basement and the Brooklyn rooftop, both equally illegal and similarly substandard, represent two completely different products of the contemporary city: one a tenement from a hundred years ago and the other the hotel of the future. To help distinguish the two, to paraphrase Charlie Sheen, you're not paying to stay there, you're paying to leave.
Reads:
By the time you read this, thousands of pet rabbits in Second Life will have already starved to death.
The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan: Interesting story about Shia LaBeouf's post-election art installation in Queens and how physical public space can assume the worst qualities of the internet.
Kevin Kelly on how artificial intelligence is misunderstood and won't make humans obsolete.
Until next time,
Drew