commentary

We should be nervous when the most profitable company in the world takes a principled stance against the most powerful government in the world. Apple released a statement today (they call it a “letter” to their customers) which states that the FBI has requested that they provide a backdoor to the iPhone’s operating system and they are refusing to give it to them. This is huge because If there is any sort of consistent observation across decades and genres of social theory it is that as organizations get bigger they tend to treat the rest of the world as a potential threat to their own interests. War criminal and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summed it up nicely: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The same can be said for Apple, China, General Motors, Russia, and Amazon. As a company or empire grows its stability relies on more and more factors and so the tendency is to bring those things into the fold either by buying them, colonizing them, or some indiscernible combination of the two. If Apple and the United States federal government are at loggerheads about data privacy it means that something big and fairly stable has ended. When powerful actors disagree, it usually heralds a major shift in one party’s conception of what is politically viable. Is that what just happened? more...

Image via TechCrunch

“How tall is Jeb Bush?” This was the question on (apparently) many people’s minds leading up to the February 13^th CBSN GOP debate. Thanks to Google, in partnership with CBSN, we now know that Americans are asking the hard questions, like “What is Ted Cruz’s real name?” “Why did Ben Carson wait to go on stage?” and, of course, a real deal breaker for me as a voter, “How old is John Kasich’s wife?”  more...

Getting my first Tamagotchi was a transformative moment in my life. I vividly remember standing in the Walmart aisle with my mom, painstakingly selecting the egg-shaped device that best represented my tastes. I was 9. I settled on the see-through purple plastic version—feminine and sophisticated, just like me. I was living in the golden age of Tamagotchis, when they were popular enough that all of my friends had one, but before teachers and schools started banning them in classrooms. Tamagotchis were, without a doubt, a status symbol. I can remember a friend of mine plopping down a key ring with SIX different devices, all the colors of the rainbow. I wondered how she could keep them all healthy. It seemed like a lot of responsibility for a single fourth grader. Not to mention that the net worth of this key ring was over $100, a fact that didn’t quite resonate with children whose allowance was around $10 a month. more...

The last democratic debate was mostly good. Two people, who represent very different visions for the future and strategies for how to arrive at that future, had just about as fair and faithful of a debate as one could expect from a cable news-hosted event. Orbiting this central debate is a swirling mass of half-arguments that has more energy than thought-out direction, made up of a cadre of writers who are lining up against the most tattered and boring of banners: Brocialism versus Lean In Feminism. The corporatized feminism that advocates for equal terms in boardroom competition and the smarmy machismo of socialism made for mansplaining both come out of several bad ideological compromises. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not attempt to move beyond these camps into a more honest discussion. more...

By now I think most people know what happened in Flint, Michigan. An unelected “emergency manager” –appointed and reporting directly to Michigan’s governor Rick Snyder– switched Flint’s water supply from Detroit municipal water to untreated Flint River water. The river water had a higher salinity than Detroit’s water which caused metalic pipes to corrode and leach toxic levels of lead into an entire city’s water supply. This happened back in 2013 and it is still an unresolved problem. The solution for Flint is straightforward: replace all the pipes and provide the kind of lifetime care needed for children and other vulnerable populations that have irreprable neurological damage from lead poisoning. What is less straightforward is how to prevent these kinds of problems from happening in the future. Because while this happened under a terrible governance structure, similar ongoing disasters are occurring in places that still have some form of elected, local governance still in tact. This is as much a problem of science and technology as it is an issue of governance and accountability. What is to be done? more...

Nick Bilton’s neighbor flew a drone outside the window of Bilton’s home office. It skeeved him out for a minute, but he got over it. His wife was more skeeved out. She may or may not have gotten over it (but probably not). Bilton wrote about the incident for The New York Times, where he works as a columnist. Ultimately, Bilton’s story concludes that drone watching is no big deal, analogous to peeping-via-binoculars, and that the best response is to simply ignore drone-watchers until they fly their devices away. With all of this, I disagree.

Drone privacy is a fraught issue, one of the many in which slow legislative processes have been outpaced by technological developments. While there remains a paucity of personal-drone laws, the case precedent trends towards punishing those who damage other people’s drones, while protecting the drone owners who fly their devices into airspace around private homes. Through legal precedent, then, privacy takes a backseat to property.

Bilton spends the majority of his article parsing this legal landscape, and tying the extant legal battles to his own experience of being watched. He begins with an account of looking out his window to see a buzzing drone hovering outside. He is both amused and disturbed, as the drone intrusion took place while he was already writing an article about drones. He reports feeling first violated and intruded upon, but this feeling quickly fades, morphing into quite the opposite. He says:   more...

Today marks the beginning of the official presidential primaries, launching off with voting in Iowa. While the political pundits and campaign camps scrutinize poll numbers, attendance trends, and even the weather, I find myself poring over this fascinating protocol document put out by NPR.

Admittedly, I’ve never voted in a primary election. I’m going to this year. Word has it, I’m not alone. With intense fractures both within and between parties, this election holds a lot at stake and political analysts say that the primary season is likely to see participation from those who normally abstain altogether, or those like me, who have historically saved their participation for the national election.

So what happens during primary voting? The answer is that it varies drastically, but Iowa has a particularly raucous caucus (<< I know).

In learning about the Iowa primaries, I am most struck by their charm, and relatedly, the simplicity of their technological apparatuses. In Iowa today, the eminent technologies include pencils, paper, voices, and feet. more...

This past year, I sort of disappeared from Twitter. Not completely – I’d poke my head in now and then – but for a number of reasons I stopped checking it at all regularly.

One of the things that ended up keeping me away for longer than I might otherwise have been was how it felt, those times when I poked my head back in. It was intimidating in a way it hadn’t been before. It was like I had been missing a long series of conversations that added up to one enormous conversation, and I no longer had any idea what was going on. Friends and colleagues and friend-colleagues with whom I used to be in nearly constant touch were suddenly discussing things I didn’t know anything about, and the prospect of trying to catch up was overwhelming. I felt like I had nothing to contribute to the conversation I left behind months ago. It was like a party I would wander into, circulate in kind of a distant and awkward fashion, and leave again. Because I had nothing to say.

I like people, but I’m very bad at feeling like I belong anywhere. It’s my default to feel like a fraud in any crowd I’m a part of, and awkwardness has a way of turning into a withdrawal spiral. This began in physical space, but physical space doesn’t have a corner on making me feel that way. Not at all.

I still don’t check Twitter very regularly.

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Nearly a month after the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge began, Oregon State Police and the FBI arrested several members of the armed militia group led by Ammon Bundy. Lavoy Finicum, the group’s spokesperson, was killed by law enforcement in the incident. Details on the confrontation are spare at this time; militia members say Finicum was complying with the officers and surrendering, while officials say he was resisting. But the wildlife refuge and the strip of highway where the confrontation occurred are not the only battlegrounds in this war. Another fight has broken out between the militia’s supporters and critics—the Amazon review page for Finicum’s novel Only by Blood and Suffering.

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I love taking and seeing photos of snow. As the east coast is enjoying right now, big snowstorms produce a blizzard of images across whatever social networks you use. As I tap through these photos this morning, I have some probably obvious thoughts as to why we take and post and like snow photos.

The Snow Day is exceptional and is thus picture worthy because we tend to document what is out of the ordinary and thus interesting and novel. The photo of snow says look how different things are right now. An image of your car so fully under it all suggests how much the normal flow is disrupted. Look what is happening to me. Look at what I witnessed.

In this way, the snow photo is participating in a larger news event, because east coast weather always seems to be an event worth caring about, which is never not funny to this midwesterner. Thus, we get the time-lapse style photo sets of the accumulation. There’s something to keeping track of the snow’s growth. How high can it go? There’s almost obsessive sports-like statistical attention paid to its progress, the hourly updated predictions down to the inch, the constant updates down to the tenth of an inch, the charting of how close we are to whatever record. The snow is progress, each extra bit making it all somehow more successful, more special, newsy, exceptional, and photographable.

Such a thick snow blanket over your world is a dramatic change of scenery, a shift in perception, and thus provides novelty worth a snap. Everyday surroundings that usually seem to have been already exhausted of their photographic potential are breathed new productive life. By making the mundane exceptional, the snow photo sits happily on any network, from the experience trophy in the Instagram scene to the spaces in between on a Snapchat stream.

And snow photos themselves look good. The white wash makes the image simple and more striking by removing extra elements from the frame. The bright snow provides instant contrast, making any subject pop. The flurries in the wind provide movement and texture and depth. The snow itself falls and is blown into beautiful and unpredictable designs and arrangements, wrapped around the contours of objects so smoothly and lifelike. And some snow photos appear almost black-and-white even when shot in color. Snow is its own photo filter.

Anyone in the snow photo is made more interesting, too. Snow implies effort and adventure, sometimes hardship and discomfort, but most of the images posted right now suggest fun. Snow is itself almost comical when it is too much. For some, snow means time off of work, off of adulthood. It can remind of childhood. So snow photos are often of play, throwing snowballs and diving in. Kids and dogs look especially happy. We get to walk, or ski, down the middle of the street. Rules suspended, we photos of people enjoying the snow dressed in costumes.

Providing extra motivation to take photos right now is that this snow is ephemeral. Like photos of a newly served plate of food, you need to document it now or never. Snow around here is quite temporary: This week’s forecast is for temperatures well above freezing. So, take and share and enjoy snow photos now. It’s not just that snow melts but that it slushes and gets dirty and refreezes into a mess that’s soon soiled and jagged. The elegant formations get shoveled and plowed into piles. The snow becomes more work than play. The novelty and documentary potential gets used up, the snow gets less photogenic, less likeable.

nathan is on twitter and this piece was crossposted from his tumblr