For the past few years there has been a troubling trend in how urban designers decide to deal with public spaces, in this post I want to go over what these things are and what they mean.
The first thing I want to go over that’s been becoming more common is the concept of “Privately Owned Public Spaces.” These space are what we would recognize as being public, such as plazas, parks, or sidewalks but have been sold through privatization measures to companies and businesses. This is done so that places that should be for public use can to transformed in a way for the owner to profit, or to create a space that is specific to what they want. Thus this is forcing what they want onto others by removing the universal use of public spaces. For example, in places with cafes or restaurants these businesses could buy the public area and remove the seating around them, only allowing paying customers to use the seating in their businesses. In this way companies can transform public spaces into ones that poses no threat to them, and by extension make that public space less useful to people. In another example these “public” spaces can have strict rules, such as no photography, not being allowed to stay for a certain amount of time, and not being able to use the space in a way that does not financially benefit the owner. Since this is a privatized and commercialized mindset anything that isn’t making money is deemed an unnecessary expense, and thus not allowed.
In public spaces that are still being made to be used by the public though, a new idea of what these spaces should be has taken root. This idea is that these spaces should be made for a very specific purpose and otherwise hostile to the user. An example of this is a recent trend to make “benches” that vaguely fulfil the idea that a resting spot should be available, while at the same time strictly enforce the idea that this is a temporary place and you aren’t supposed to stay. This can be seen in objects such as “leaning benches” that just give people a place to lean instead of actually sit, or specifically designing beaches to be uncomfortable by adding spacers or narrow “arm rests” that are too short to be used. All these are methods to make public spaces less a place of gathering and meeting and instead a transitional place that actively discourages long term use.
This all ties into the concept that goes by many different names, but can be summarized in the idea of “Hostile Architecture.” This is a design philosophy that seeks to make the design of public spaces hostile to its users, or more specifically to discourage usage that is not approved of by the owner. In this way I think Hostile Architecture goes against the very idea of a public space, IE a space that the public can use in a way they see fit. This idea is embodied in the creation of, and response by, the creators of, the Camden bench. This bench was specifically designed in a way that it was only supposed to be used a certain way, and the creators even try to defend it by saying that “[Because] there is no ‘correct’ way to sit on it… it becomes a far more inclusive seat encouraging social interaction.” This notion that they are somehow being creative and helping people by making an uncomfortable bench that isn’t as good as a normal bench by any measure of the imagination, is a perfect example of how this was specifically created as a hostile object. The creators are trying to redefine something that is explicitly negative as something that is somehow a positive because of the connotations of making something explicitly negative means.
But, one of their other responses is an even better look into how this mentality works, “Homelessness should never be tolerated in any society and if we start designing in to accommodate homeless then we have totally failed as a society.“ This brings up one the major points I have about Hostile Architecture, and that is its function to hide problems in society. By creating hostile public spaces it doesn’t fix crime, drug use, violence, and homelessness like the creators of this stuff would have you believe. Instead all this does is make it so problems are less visible on the surface because it’s not as convenient to do them in public anymore. People don’t just stop being homeless because you design benches they can’t sleep on, or put down spikes so they can’t stay somewhere that’s safe. These are problems with society that can not be fixed by commercializing public spaces at the whims of a profit seeking owner, or by making them unusable by anyone but the “right” kind of person.
All of this ties back to one central source. Privatization only helps the wealthy that own the land and helps them to create a situation where they get more money. And ignoring these social problems only creates a situation where taxes to fund social help can be cut because the public perception can be that it’s not really a problem. All of this only benefits one group of people, and that is the upper class that control almost all of the money. By removing things people can use for free they are creating a system where they can be relied on more and more, and people are required to pay for what used to be cheap or even free. Once again I will say this, in the capitalist system there is no room for anything that does not directly benefit the people that own and control society. They will continue to sink themselves into any part of society we let them in, and only by understanding these motives and reasonings can there be any resistance against it.
Centurylink is a giant, scammy telco notorious for larding its
customers’ bills with fraudulent charges, and instructing its customer
service reps to do everything possible not to waive those charges; they
also open fake accounts in their customers’ names, a la Wells Fargo, and
then rack up charges against them.
Naturally, they’re getting sued; their customers have banded together in
a class action suit. Centurylink has a great defense for this: it
claims that these poor saps don’t actually do business with Centurylink,
they do business with a bunch of shell company subsidiaries that no one
has ever heard of. According to Centurylink, it has zero customers.
Moreover, Centurylink says that its shell companies have already made
all the angry people it stole from agree to “broad, all-compassing
arbitration, and class-action waiver clauses in their service
contracts,” so they can’t sue Centurylink or its subsidiaries.
It gets better! Centurylink claims that this binding arbitration and
class-action waiver also extends to the accounts that it fraudulently
opened in its customers’ names – that when it forged their consent to
open new accounts, it also forged their consent not to sue them over it,
and that this is somehow binding (Wells Fargo also took this position).
Centurylink’s victims say it’s all bullshit. They didn’t agree to
binding arbitration, they didn’t do business with Centurylink’s
disposable shell-companies, and forging their signature on a contract
does not bind them to the contract’s terms.
While people around the world were inspired by the resilience, fearlessness and savvy of the students who created a national gun-control movement
in the wake of the Parkland shooting, American right-wing leaders
looked at these kids and saw evidence of the urgency to destroy public
education and replace it with religious private schools and charter
schools.
Right wing shock jocks like Mark Levin said the Parkland student
uprising proved that schools were “propaganda mills” that were down on
“genitalia assignment, bathrooms, and gyms; whether it’s the school
lunch program that’s even politicized … radical environmentalism is
advanced, capitalism is trashed.”
The anti-education group United States Parents Involved in Education
released a statement condemning students who want to be safe from mass
shootings, blaming this view on “children are not being taught accurate
history of the United States and the reasons for American
exceptionalism.”
Rush Limbaugh just flat-out lied, claiming that only public schools –
and not religious schools – are targeted by shooters. Ted Nugent called
student leaders “ignorant and dangerously stupid.” Tom Tancredo, a GOP
ex-Congressjerk and former high-school teacher, called for teachers and
administrators to be punished for failing to prevent student leadership,
condemning “reports of students being punished for NOT walking out of
class and teachers being disciplined for questioning the educational
character of the event.”
Public education has become a flashpoint for resisting authoritarianism
and oligarchic rule. At the same time, support for charter schools –
always a stalking horse for mixing church and state, reinstituting
segegration, and lining the pockets of fly-by-night education profiteers
– has plummeted among Democrats, as progressives have abandoned their
unquestioning support for charters and demanding high-quality public
schools.
Embattled Trump Secretary of the Interior chair Ryan Zinke (previously)
unveiled a plan to raise the service charge for using our nation’s
parks to $70/day (it’s currently $25/day), a move that would price
access to national parks out of the budgets of 71% of working-class Americans.
Seoul-based designer Yang Si Young created the “Library Chair” in answer
to a personal challenge: to design a piece of furniture that’s also a
library; with built-in shelving and a place to read.
Back in 2016, the ACLU and First Look (the publishers of The Intercept) sued the US government
to force it to clarify that the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act –
the overbroad statute passed during over a panic sparked by the movie
“Wargames” – does not prohibit violations of terms of service.
At issue is the CFAA’s incredibly broad definition of hacking:
“exceeding your authorization” on a computer. Tech companies have argued
that this means that any violation of their terms of service (through
which they define your authorization) is a felony under the CFAA. This
was the basis for the US government’s legal attack on Aaron Swartz,
allowing a federal prosecutor to threaten him with 35 years in prison
for failing to abide by the legal fine-print on a website.
The US Government moved to dismiss the suit and a Federal Circuit judge
has dismissed their motion, and will allow the suit to proceed.
The Intercept and the ACLU are seeking a judgment that would allow them
to systematically explore whether services are practicing illegal racial
and gender-based discrimination in advertising and offering financial
products to their users; to do this, they want to be able to create fake
personas and login to the services to gather data.
Axios’s Joe Uchill points out that this is a fraught business in the
midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with some skeptics arguing
that a victory in the suit for the ACLU and The Intercept would be the
thin edge of the wedge for allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica
to violate terms of service by scraping user profiles. I think that this
is overstated: other circuits have already narrowed the CFAA
and its ability to turn EULAs into private law; and the issue being
argued here is a narrow one: whether a specific legal activity can be
made illegal by adding a term-of-service prohibiting it.
i can’t believe all the people losing their shit over this post are the same people who make ‘triggered’ jokes.
Here’s the thing.
If you at all monitor your language based on your audience—avoiding curse words in front of kids, using bigger words in front of your boss—you obviously care about the impression your words give people.
Do you avoid talking about the attractive sex after your bestie’s breakup? Congratulations, friend, you’re being a decent human being.
Your friend wishes you call them Charlie instead of Charlotte. It’s just a nickname. Would you say “No, your birth certificate says Charlotte so I’m calling you Charlotte?”
Your co-worker tells you that he gets extremely uncomfortable when you clap him on the shoulder, due to a creepy uncle who did the same thing. Do you make a point to clap him on the shoulder every time you see him?
It is really not that difficult to be “politically correct.” It does not mean that you must eliminate all opinions completely, it merely means—at a basic level—that you should attempt to be aware of your audience and how your words and actions affect them.
Don’t call it being “PC,” if you must. Call it being “aware and empathetic.” Being a human with decency and respect for other people, cultures, and experiences.
^boom. couldn’t have said it better myself.
When someone says “I’m not politically correct” all I hear is “I’m an asshole and I think I’m being edgy and a rebel when all I’m doing is perpetuating the status quo.”
Alexander Kott is chief of the Network Science Division at the Army Research Laboratory; in a new paper,
he rounds up several years’ worth of papers that he wrote or
co-authored, along with some essays and articles by others, on what an
“Internet of Battle Things” will look like.
Kott describes a future in which sensing/actuating militarized devices
are capable of gathering intelligence and acting on it, sometimes with
lethal force (everything from launching a missile to firing a gun to
using “directed energy weapons”), and predicts that “constraints” in
“cognitive bandwidth” (that is, the ability of humans to interpret and
act on the intelligence from these devices) makes these things
effectively autonomous, dealing out death untouched by human hands.
Of course, Kott also anticipates that malware will be a big problem for
these systems – once you trust a lethal robot to act autonomously to
kill your adversaries and not your own troops, anything that compromises
that robot could turn it into a fifth columnist that wiped out its own
side. Kott proposes that active-defense software will be common – that
is, software that detects other software trying to compromise it and
strikes back by attempting to compromise the enemy’s automatic systems.
Kott describes how these battlefields will consist primarily of gadgets
with a small rump of people who oversee and maintain them, but what he
omits is the political dimension of this: American wars of aggression
are often ended when Americans sicken at the deaths of their children on
the battlefield; the incredible staying power of the perpetual wars in
the Middle East and Afghanistan (not to mention Yemen) owes much to the
use of ranged weapons that are deployed with a minimum of exposure to
American lives; and the use of contractors to do the dirtiest, most
dangerous jobs in the battlefield, so that the official soldier
body-count is low.
As battlefields become roboticized, Americans engaged in military
adventurism primarily become riskers-of-treasure, not riskers-of-blood.
What’s more, a battle that kills a bunch of expensive robots is a
profit-center for the company that replaces those robots for the next
battle, producing excess capital that can be used to lobby for more
battles and more wars and more blown up robots and more purchase orders
for robots to replace them.
But also unspoken and implicit in the essay is that the typical American
adversary is long on blood and short on treasure, pitting insurgent
human flesh and IEDs against drones and other advanced materiel. The
robots will not merely be killing other robots – they will be shedding
oceans of blood. It just won’t be American blood, and thus the blood
will only do a little to shift American public opinion away from more
and more war.
