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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...

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...

“Aren’t you glad you’re not there right now?” This is, if personal experience is any indication, the state-mandated response Floridians must give to anyone that claims to be visiting from anything north of the state line. It doesn’t matter the context —a bartender on Hollywood beach, an emergency room physician in North Miami— they are all very happy that you found your way to Florida this winter. The phrase has a wide range of registers though, that go from outright smugness to a thinly veiled request to validate one’s decision to settle down in 2,300 square feet of something called Flamingo Palisades. “Please,” they seem to say, “tell me this is as good as it gets.”

I grew up just north of Miami and even though I have little desire to live on whatever is left of it after the seas rise to their predicted heights, I value the perspective it has given me. Florida sensitizes you to the effort humans put in to turning spaces into places. Florida’s economy is based on the constant re-invention of its own brand, always changing for different demographics and markets. Florida’s cities are the sociocultural equivalents of GMO corn: equal parts science and marketing, growing out of an artificial substrate of designer chemicals and excrement. They are bland and immensely profitable by design. They don’t conform to existing economies of scale, they make their own.

The Sunbelt, that stretch of Post World War II development that became desirable for modern, full-time habitation only after the advent of the air conditioner, isn’t so much a geographic feature as it is an historic anomaly. It is undergirded by cheap fossil fuels, leisure time, a guaranteed (for some) retirement age, and modern architecture. The winters are warm and prices for goods are generally kept at a libertarian low but the car-based transportation system doesn’t really let most people enjoy either of these qualities. Most of your time is spent burning expensive gas in an air-conditioned Hyundai on a gridlocked highway.

Living in one’s car, albeit among a very different set of conditions, was the focus of a recent essay in Fusion by Malcolm Harris. In exploring his titular question “Where Should a Good Millennial Live?,” he reveals that some of the more trendy alternative housing options pitched to younger generations are substantial reductions in the quality of life: houses not much bigger than a box truck or actually living in a box truck in the parking lot of your employer, are being marketed to young adults as the American Dream of the 21^st Century. In addition to living in tiny houses and cars, Millennials are also being encouraged to rehab the leftovers of the post-industrial economy. If you’re not willing to live in something impossibly small, you can always own lots of property laced with lead and asbestos.

Unlike tiny houses or a truck in the parking lot however, the Rustbelt may hold some liberatory potential. Before we get to that though, I would like to sort out all of the promises and fanfare that has surrounded Rustbelt living and describe why the most publicized reasons for moving to the Rustbelt are not what makes it so interesting. more...

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I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. In all honesty I probably will not watch it until I can assure that I will see a high definition version for free through whatever means comes to my disposal. What I have seen, the cross-promotions, the essays, and the toys, tells me everything I need to know to assess it as a piece of culture. Star Wars is not a movie, it is a platform for media and a financial vehicle. Star Wars has plot like America has elections. It’s almost a formality, the official pomp heralding in a new wave of characters, theories, and controversies. If we black box the film itself and instead look at all of the culture that spews out from its unknown (to me) depths, I think we get a much more cohesive (I’d even go so far as to say honest) assessment of the entire event. more...

Both are technology books that came out in 2015, and John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds is perhaps the best counterpoint, or antidote, to Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation. Turkle is the avatar of digital dualism, seeing a real world that is natural versus technology that is inhuman and added on. Peters instead puts forward a view of media and technology as part of the environment, and the environment as inherently technological and itself a type of media. Peters doesn’t think of only one all-encompassing environment but of many elements, be they water or language or fire or digitality. Each is its own intersecting environment. Whether you like to think of digitality as part of one world or infinity worlds is an improvement over the digital dualist mistake of seeing two. more...

Too few people are concerned that a national political party has the technical ability to pull the plug on a campaign whenever it wants. When news broke that the DNC had indefinitely revoked the Sanders’ campaign’s access to essential voter data the story quickly coalesced around the facts of the data breach and the reaction by the campaigns and the party. At no point though, have we stopped and asked why or even how the Democratic National Committee controls the data that goes through the tools built and maintained by their private vendor NGP VAN. more...

Barring some extreme changes in the political climate the following will be true of the American electorate in 40 years: There will be no living memory of a time when real income rose for anyone but the super wealthy. No one, save the oldest citizens will have had a post-9/11 adulthood with all of the normalization of war that entails. Schools will be understood as prime targets for extreme acts of violence even as rates of property and violent crime fall in the aggregate. The total lack of confidence in all established institutions with the exception of police, military, and small business will continue as major cities are washed away as governments look on and refuse to invest in any kind of infrastructure. This will also be happening as America reaches a major demographic milestone: whites (as we presently define them) will no longer be a statistical majority.

Given this sort of potential future, we should take a look at how younger people, respond to the kind of political rhetoric that is endemic to crisis, uncertainty, and fear: fascism. Everyone from Jeb Bush to your favorite anarchist barista knows and has said in no uncertain terms that Donald Trump is a fascist. One might be heartened to see that younger voters have not responded well to Trump’s campaign. According to RealClearPolitics, less than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters are under 30. According to Pew, only a third of millennials identify as Republicans while half identify as Democrats. An optimist might see this as a younger, more politically progressive electorate rejecting hate and fear mongering but I am more skeptical. Afterall, there is not a whole lot of ideological space between Trump’s “ban all muslim immigrants” and Democratic candidates’ universal agreement around the continued bombing of muslims using flying robots. Would if it’s just the messaging that turns Millennial away?  Would if people who have spent most of their lives in the 21^st century, do not respond the same way to 20^th century authoritarianism? Any surprise at the popularity of the Trump brand is rooted in a willful ignorance of widespread, explicit white supremacy. What is more terrifying still, is that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands millions of Americans that think Trump does not go far enough. Even if Trump loses this time, we should take note of what his campaign reveals: a nascent and likely growing nationalist movement in America. One that I suspect will be fully baked and equipped with more effective messaging by the time post-millenial generations make up the majority of the voting public. more...

Sometimes it is worth it to follow a bad idea down, as far as it goes, and pull back up the contorted, gross, and contradictory thing that it has latched onto. That’s important because sometimes that bad idea is attached to a value or belief that you yourself hold. It’s just worth knowing what your values and beliefs are capable of, when applied in extreme degrees or to cases you would not necessarily apply them to. This week dozens of state governors and Republican presidential candidates have come out to say that they, even though they have no legal standing to do so, would not allow Syrian refugees into the states they govern. They usually couch their declarations in terms of risk evaluation. For example, Florida governor Rick Scott told reporters he couldn’t possibly let Syrians into the state “without an extensive evaluation of the risk these individuals may pose to our national security.” If we were to put aside the obvious –that this is nothing more than naked xenophobia dressed up as national security concern trolling– and draw out a cost benefit analysis, (the only language bureaucracies understand) could we possibly find a suitable “good enough” scenario? more...