#68: Bechtel & Balkan Raves
The popular backlash against Silicon Valley's current cycle and its products has undeniably gone mainstream in the past year or so. Scarcely a day passes that I don't read an article lambasting a tech company for misusing personal data, melting our brains, or undermining culture as a whole. It's already hard to imagine the bygone optimism of 2011, when continuously sharing your location on Foursquare was supposed to facilitate serendipitous encounters with friends at the airport (does it make you feel old to learn that teens are deeply nostalgic for 2015?). Silicon Valley has its own culture war, as vitriolic as its broader counterpart and increasingly polarized between, well, the kinds of people who hate Elon Musk and the kinds of people who still think he's cool. I can't exactly say that I'm not a part of this backlash, but having recognized its dominance, I'm increasingly interested in identifying silver linings and opportunities for radical anamnesis rather than piling on with another essay about why Facebook isn't cool (don't hold me to that though).
We currently have all the tools we need to realize visions far more exciting than the reality we've actually brought to fruition. Many have pointed out that our failures are political, not technological, but the deeper tragedy is simply that our underlying values are kind of lame. Geoff Manaugh assessed our condition perfectly in a discussion of the 1960s futurist architecture collective Archigram: "The people who can be seen as having implemented the Archigramian project, so to speak, aren't 'avant-garde architects' but, say, Walmart and the US military...Archigram promised utopia but, for the most part, their ideas simply resulted in bulk hairdryer shipments to the suburbs...The people building instant cities today aren't the Balkan ravers of the 1990s (at least no more); it's Camp Bondsteel and the logistics support team of Bechtel. Or, for that matter, it's the 'megaslums.' Either way, it's not a leisure class of hi-fi owning Jimi Hendrix aficionados."
Again, the backlash against the mainstream technology industry is partially a result of uninspiring values that the public is finally recognizing and rejecting. Here I don't mean moral compass and workplace culture, but goals—what we think technology should actually accomplish. We devote our historically unprecedented knowledge and resources to such prosaic ends as making things easier that are already easy (hi, Alexa) and monetizing things that already work without money. We actively hope for monopolies. Truly magical possibilities like virtual reality, meanwhile, falter to the extent that they don't align with those objectives. It's easy to forget that social media embodied similar promise before monetization ruined it: Ben Thompson observes that Snapchat currently faces an existential crisis because it's "an inherently personal product inhospitable to third-party content"—in other words, not profitable, just really fun to use, and thus doomed. One reason there's so much enthusiasm for blockchain technology, often misattributed to crypto-greed, is that it's one of the few high-profile developments that at least offers the possibility of an alternate paradigm: something closer to utopia than ordering another hairdryer to your house.
Reads:
Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell) on historic building preservation and Flickr's role in documenting vanishing architecture (the "Kmart" group on Flickr "has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject.")
New Orleans is building a billion-dollar airport for the end of the world: "The era of climate change is also the age of the airport, in which international, cross-cultural efforts to bolster and maintain human air travel proceed at any cost."
Good luck not wasting a meaningful chunk of today exploring this 3D visualization of the world's population. Large college campuses are some of the most densely populated places in the United States; this is the first map I've seen that conveys that.