Category: ideas

With an eye to the surprisingly large amount of present-day consumer technology that was predicted and inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, a constellation of companies and independent designers and consultants has formed to “help clients create forward-looking fiction to generate ideas and IP for progress or profit. … And corporations like Ford, Nike, Intel, and Hershey’s, it turns out, are willing to pay hefty sums for their own in-house Minority Reports.” — Medium

We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts. This was demonstrated in a controversial 2014 study in which 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants opted to give themselves unpleasant electric shocks rather than spend 15 minutes in peaceful contemplation. – Aeon

“The question, then, isn’t so much whether the tests measure anything significant; they do, at least to a point. The meatier questions are these: whom do the tests overlook? And how does our culture’s dogged focus on test-measured potential shape what those in the system become?” — Aeon

More than other tech companies, Facebook has insisted that its commercial success benefits the world. There are examples of the wealth from a tech business being used by its founder to support a grand project like space exploration, as Tesla’s Elon Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos do. Alphabet harnesses the money from the Google search engine to support expensive, speculative “moon shot” engineering projects with the potential to change the world. Facebook’s point is more direct: The business goals of Facebook are simply good for the world. – Wired

The ubiquity of virtual images has indeed made encounters with original objects ever more coveted, feeding the stampede of visitors and our carbon footprint. Veneration of original works has fuelled astronomical prices for a few dozen artists, mostly Modern and contemporary. The explosion of cultural tourism has been exacerbated by a bull art market, the global growth of the middle class and museum selfies spreading Fomo (fear of missing out).

“Really, I’m horrified,” says Arlie Hochschild, who introduced the concept back in 1983 as “the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job … from the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural to the bill collector whose job it is to be, if necessary, harsher than natural.” Now, she points out, “it’s being used, for example, to refer to the enacting of to-do lists … It’s also being applied to perfectionism: You’ve absolutely got to do the perfect Christmas holiday.” — The Atlantic

With 32 episodes ordered for the talk show, and a reach meant to extend to 200 countries, Patriot Act is momentous for U.S. talk shows – and for Netflix. “Minhaj often uses phrases such as ‘our own community,’ or refers to the audience as ‘we,’ in his segments, as if everyone in the crowd shared a brown, Muslim psyche, like himself. A glance at the studio audience on any given Wednesday — the show airs every Sunday — indicates he’s not totally off.”

Decimated by online shopping and giant box stores, the British high street needs help. “The identity and self-esteem of entire towns and city districts is wrapped up with retail – what, for example, is a ‘market town’ if it doesn’t have a market? As it has become ingrained that one of the main forms of shared public life is shopping, its loss becomes an existential threat to society.”

And for this, you can blame Uber.

Most of us live in a state of general ignorance about our physical surroundings. It’s not our fault; centuries of technological sophistication and global commerce have distanced most of us from making physical things, and even from seeing or knowing how they are made. But the slow and pervasive separation of people from knowledge of the material world brings with it a serious problem.