New and Old #151
Friday roundup and commentary
‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything, Financial Times, Cory Doctorow, February 8, 2024
NSFW:
From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.
And:
What’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.
Everyone knows in their bones what he’s talking about. Twitter bots, Facebook ads, self-checkout, airport terminal check-in kiosks, the spammy later pages of the Amazon search results and unreachable customer service. This isn’t down to just a few bad CEOs:
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy.
This is also interesting:
Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.
They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be.
And this interesting bit on how little bit of interpretive sleight of hand effectively nullified antitrust law:
From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it….But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality.
Finally, the extent to which the tech companies have warped the law around intellectual property:
Say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.
That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
There’s a lot in this piece, and I’m sure some of it could be argued with, but it’s quite interesting.
City Planning’s Greatest Innovation Makes a Comeback, The Atlantic, M. Nolan Gray, February 15, 2024
In one sense, my friend and I lived in the most planned environment in history. Every building around us was subject to a set of rigid regulations. If our neighbor turned her garage into an apartment or adjusted the pitch of her roof, zoning enforcers would be out in 24 hours. But when it came to the public realm—the space between buildings that ties a city together—there was no plan, except to move cars through a landscape of lawns.
There’s order, but there’s also a kind of freedom, in a pre-designated development pattern:
As Alain Bertaud—a former city planner for the World Bank—points out, planning a grid in advance of growth allows surveyors to demarcate the public and private realms, reserving space for necessary infrastructure and ensuring that future expansion follows a coherent pattern. That might sound restrictive, but the result is a blank canvas that empowers cities to grow and adapt.
This is as good a way to put it as I’ve ever seen: “Many American cities are both overplanned and under-planned.”
TLDR: bring back the grid. Read the whole thing.
As researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we had a question: Can America — the land of the free and the home of the sprawl — re-weave its urban fabric according to the 15-minute city model and achieve greater walkability? Our new study has assessed this possibility, and on Monday we published our detailed findings in the scientific journal Nature Human Behavior. By analyzing mobile-phone location data for 40 million Americans, we measured how often a neighborhood’s residents carry out essential trips within a quarter-hour radius.
This is important:
First, the study quantifies an important reality: The overwhelming majority of Americans have never experienced anything resembling a 15-minute city. The median resident, we found, makes only 14% of their consumption trips within a 15-minute walking radius. We are used to a world where every errand is an epic road trip, and we hardly notice the high costs we pay in time, gasoline, parking spaces and pollution.
I wrote about that issue here.
They go on to point out that America has some very walkable cities, but also that most population growth is happening in sprawling places. True. But I think our urban heritage and history is frequently undervalued even by a lot of urbanists.
My short take on this question is yes, of course, because America was an urban country up until we broke from the rest of the world in the early-mid-20th century. So I would not even ask the same question, but rather ask, “Can America rediscover 15-minute cities?”
The Moral Panic Over Ozempic Misses the Point, NYMag Intelligencer, Rachael Bedard, February 2, 2024
This is an interesting piece—taking somewhat seriously but also kind of dismissing the navel-gazing upper-middle-class lefty narratives at play here. Which is why I like this bit:
We don’t have popular, well-developed narratives about the chronic diseases that result from glucose derangement and excess fat tissue, which disproportionately debilitate people who are poor and racialized. We have the cultural elite’s obsession with Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, we have cancer memoirs, and we have an emerging post-pandemic literature about the vagaries and difficulties of living with long COVID. We have no canon of great writing about struggling with cirrhosis or the decision to get a diabetic amputation. “There aren’t breathless profiles of a pharmaceutical drug because it will help a diabetic manage her blood glucose level,” McMillan Cottom observed in her essay. She’s right. America’s silent majority of chronic-disease sufferers — dying prematurely, disabled, or on dialysis — desperately need this drug. For them, taking this medication and losing weight isn’t a question of succumbing to vanity or vanquishing one’s inner critic.
In other words, privileged, affluent, healthy people are getting attention by flaunting moral concern over whether a drug that helps you lose weight will hurt the cause of fat acceptance, while out of the picture are desperate, sick, poor people for whom these things could likely not matter less.
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I think self-checkout and Facebook ads are very different experiences. I like self-checkout as long as the machine functions properly. The machines use space more efficiently, at least for shoppers with relatively small amounts of groceries. At any large supermarket I see plenty of unused manned lanes any time it isn’t peak shopping, but self-checkout doesn’t get throttled back for slow times because it doesn’t require paying someone by the hour.
Something I rarely see considered in discussions of walkable cities is the intersection of climate and age. I'm currently 60, living in the upper Midwest, and able to walk at a pretty good pace with little chance of a fall being disabling.
But 10 years from now? The same distance will not only be likely to take me longer - and therefore leave me exposed longer to vagaries of temperature and precipitation - but will also increase my chance of injury from slips and falls. As I age, I'm more likely to need vehicular access to my destinations regardless of distance, and that means factoring in the necessary infrastructure.
I could most definitely be - and would honestly like to be - wrong, but I simply don't see much of the urbanist conversation considering the realities of life in Cleveland, Milwaukee, or St Paul.