#75: Luxury surveillance and maintenance

💎 Word gems

The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’ (The Atlantic / Chris Gilliard)

I often worry about how much data I willingly hand over for the sake of convenience. The article compares handing data to companies like Amazon and Google with city-wide surveillance technologies. The article doesn’t pose any solution, but we need to start talking about a different model for managing our own data (and don’t say blockchain).

These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior. Stripped of their gloss, these devices are similar to the ankle monitors and surveillance apps such as SmartLINK that are forced on people on parole or immigrants awaiting hearings.

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance (Noema / Alex Vuocolo)

We have a bias toward creating new things. This fantastic essay looks at maintenance as a framework to address some of today’s problem, such as climate change.

Technical and political-economic concerns are perversely entangled. There is the problem of a crumbling bridge, and then there is the problem of coordinating public action to fix a crumbling bridge. There is a technical answer, a set of actions and materials that must be brought to bear, but the political answer is just as important. The follow-up questions pour in: What if it would be better to build a new bridge in a new place, based on changes in demographics? What if the bridge was constructed shoddily from the beginning and should be completely rebuilt? What if society is moving away from automobile travel and requires other bridges built in different ways?

The Crypto Story (Bloomberg / Matt Levine)

Matt Levine’s 40,000 word piece on crypto has been shared a lot since it was published. It’s a balanced, yet critical, history of crypto. There’s a lot of words just describing crypto but these two quotes really get to the heart of the problem - crypto isn’t yet connected to the physical world, but with everything become a line it a database it certainly could be.

The crypto financial system is very fun and cool and has invented a lot of interesting stuff. But it’s mostly not where people go to get money to buy a house or open a store. Bitcoin and Ethereum and DeFi could all vanish tomorrow without a trace, and most businesses that make stuff in the physical world would be just fine.

and

But another part of the answer might be that the real world—growing food, building houses—is a smaller part of economic life than it used to be, and that manipulating symbolic objects in online databases is a bigger part. Modern life is lived in databases. And crypto is about a new way of keeping databases (on the blockchain).

If you build a financial system that has trouble with houses but is particularly suited to financing video games—one that lets you keep your character on the blockchain, and borrow money from a decentralized platform to buy a cool hat for her, or whatever, I don’t know—then that system might be increasingly valuable as video games become an increasingly important part of life. If you build a financial system whose main appeal is its database, it will be well-suited to a world lived in databases. If the world is increasingly software and advertising and online social networking and, good Lord, the metaverse, then the crypto financial system doesn’t have to build all the way back down to the real world to be valuable. The world can come to crypto.

💩 Cool shit

Pokémon Cards CSS Holographic Effects - You don’t need to like Pokémon to appreciate how incredibly real and tactile these digital cards feel.

DiscMaster - 11 terabytes of CD-ROM and floppy disk data.

Slow Roads - A meditative driving experience in a procedurally generated landscape.

Prompt.ist - “Multiplayer stable confusion.” A Figma-like live artboard using stable diffusion.

3dtext2gif - If you miss WinArt style 3D text, this is for you.

People’s Graphic Design Archive - A wonderful crowd-sourced archive of inclusive graphic design history.

Daft Punk Cafe - A celebration of Daft Punk. Listen to Daft Punk radio or play some Daft-Punk inspired games.

Endless Horse - Scroll for an endless ASCII horse.

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