New and Old #96
Friday roundup and commentary
File Not Found, The Verge, Monica Chin, September 22, 2021
This is a fascinating piece. My dad used to do computer programming (nobody called it “coding” then), and he taught me how to organize computer files and folders. To this day I keep a fairly organized digital workspace. Since then, it’s always been intuitive to me that a computer’s graphical user interface is an analogy for an office. The desktop and the file/folder system are representations of actual desktops and actual file and folder systems, i.e. filing cabinets.
And yet:
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Why?
It’s possible that the analogy multiple professors pointed to — filing cabinets — is no longer useful since many students Drossman’s age spent their high school years storing documents in the likes of OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy. “When I want to scroll over to Snapchat, Twitter, they’re not in any particular order, but I know exactly where they are,” says Vogel, who is a devoted iPhone user. Some of it boils down to muscle memory.
The extent to which efficient computer use actually relied on a familiarity with old and now largely forgotten physical or analog office procedures is really fascinating.
These snippets are just snippets; there’s a lot here. Read the whole thing!
What made John Deere change its tune on Right to Repair?, PIRG, Kevin O’Reilly, January 31, 2023
I’d argue that we’ve been effective in three pursuits — finding and exposing the facts about obstacles to repair; organizing farmers and sharing their stories; and bringing public support into the halls of power— that helped us pressure Deere to act.
I’ve mentioned right to repair here before. It’s a very interesting, old-fashioned economic populist sort of idea: progressive but not left, if that makes sense. And its political clout is growing. This piece is promotional to an extent, but also a good example of what the movement is up to.
How Nextdoor Put Neighbors In a Housing Policy ‘Cage Match,’ Vice, Aaron Gordon, January 24, 2023
I tried Nextdoor for a few months, and found it mostly boring. I found one housing fight—through my wife’s account, not even mine—and saw a bunch of “Was that just gunshots?” and “Why is there a helicopter flying over?” posts. I guess I didn’t have the most NIMBY neighbors. But I’ve heard a lot of stories, including about a fellow from a former communist country who found the Nextdoor debate too nasty and intimidating to participate in.
The housing debate on Nextdoor is not just about arguing in an online vacuum. The arguments are, themselves, a form of online organizing. Local voices build constituencies and support through the platform, which they then leverage into political power by filing hundreds of comments with city councils, showing up to hearings, and filing lawsuits. As a result, Nextdoor has quietly become one of the most consequential and important—but generally overlooked—social media sites.
For this article, Motherboard interviewed housing activists—ones both for and against new housing, zoning, and development proposals—in five cities around the country to discuss the role Nextdoor plays in the housing debates in their communities. While the specifics vary with each city, it is clear Nextdoor plays an increasingly important part, sometimes a crucial one, in how housing debates are framed, discussed, fought over, and ultimately decided in local politics, even if only a tiny minority of people actually participates in these conversations.
I increasingly sort of think housing is everything. None of this should be the way it is. But it is. Read the whole thing.
The Toad Factor, Town & Country Magazine, Keith Hayes, February 19, 2020
I’ve been reading The Wind in the Willows, and I came across this article that bounces off of it to talk about the road to the dominance of the car in Britain:
Although the motor car dominates our lives today, even in the early fifties, it was till possible to drive relatively unhindered on Britain’s highways.
My grandfather gave me my first car. It was a black Austin 10, creaking at the seams and rattling over the potholes, but it worked. Like Toad, I roared along the lanes and byways, carefree and unhindered. The speedometer didn’t work properly and vacillated wildly. I never knew how fast I was going, and most policemen just waved cheerily as my chums and I pumped at the brakes to force the vehicle to stop. Again, it was a matter of judgement. We guessed at the amount of road required to pull up before the white line and the word Halt, painted on the surface of the road.
Yet that little vehicle took a good part of the cricket team, heads poked through the open sunroof, pads, gloves and bats stuffed between bodies to Saturday’s match. Prayers issued skyward that we wouldn’t run out of petrol before we reached the cricket green, or that between us we could stump up sixpences to buy a gallon of fuel at half a crown.
It sounds, from this piece anyway, as though car dominance took longer to cement itself across the pond. Although, in an interesting turn, you can drive down a lot old bypassed U.S. Highways and find yourself in a ghostly version of the 1950s, like I did here.
Related Reading:
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Darn, all the photo links except for the cover shot seem to be missing in the ghostly version of the 1950s.
Re: cars in the UK and car culture there - it took until the 1970s before at least half of households owned a car, and the number of cars on the road took off quite significantly during the Thatcher years - if I understand the stats correctly, from about 20 million in 1980 to 32.7 million in 2020, which was a pretty dramatic increase. Over the same time, you can definitely see the change from high street shops being supplemented by a supermarket in smaller towns and villages to shopping centers outside of the older built areas as bypass roads were constructed to get all those cars out of the way and moving faster. As an example, when we would drive from Newcastle (where my mother's parents lived) to Fife (where my father's parents lived) in the late 70s and early 80s, there were years where you'd have to drive through Edinburgh to the Forth road bridge and then work your way through Fife on the local roads through Kirkcaldy and various mining and fishing villages. The Edinburgh bypass made that unnecessary (and created the opportunity for large out of town shopping centers like Fort Kinnaird), south of the Forth, and by 2000 or so the combination of the A92 and the A915 made it possible to get to the grandparents in half the time without going through any of the coastal towns.... efficient, probably better for the people in the towns and villages in terms of not being inundated with cars, but less good for local commerce and seeing the sights, as it were.