Does the future look like NYC or Animal Crossing?
With all the talk of “reopening” we thought it important to speculate about what does come next, whenever this current phase of homemade masks, grocery delivery, and sourdough starters comes to a close. Read on about creativity borne from distance, privacy-oriented surveillance, and the redesign of urban spaces.
Also, if you want to check out a great podcast on design and more, Alexis chatted last week with Alison Rand and Jacqui Frey for the 3rd episode of NCommon.
— Alexis & Matt
1: Side effect: a more creative internet?
Over the past decade or so, the playful optimism of the earlier internet has largely given way to polished corporate machinery and profit-minded startups. This MIT Tech Review piece notes that the past few weeks have seen a resurgence of more community-oriented activity. As we all shelter in place, the need for social connection has intensified as our usual channels for that connection have shut down. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of online dance parties, Zoom dating, virtual book clubs, comedy shows, FigmaTown and everything in between. The internet is starting to feel a little bit more like the one we had in the days of IRC, the hamster dance, and Geocities. Of course, the cynical question is whether this is a new opportunity for creativity and community, or if we’re just experiencing a brief blip before these efforts get packaged and monetized. Let’s hope it’s the former.
Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the internet?
Every few days, tens of thousands of people on Instagram join a virtual dance party hosted by DJ D-Nice…
www.technologyreview.com • Share
2: Mapping the new surveillance states
In order to track and combat the spread of coronavirus, we need to track people — who’s infected, who might be infected, and with whom they’ve come into contact. One of the key tensions we will be investigating over the next months will be how to balance effectively stemming the pandemic with the inevitable tradeoffs around privacy and surveillance. OneZero has put together a fantastic guide to the surveillance programs being spun up in various countries, and how they’re being implemented. Watch this space if you want to keep an eye on the growth and regulation around these efforts.
We Mapped How the Coronavirus Is Driving New Surveillance Programs Around the World
In an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 30 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to…
3: Speaking of surveillance...
There’s been a lot of coverage (some of it extremely technical) about Apple and Google’s collaboration on new APIs to assist in contact tracing, but The Verge has published a very useful summary. In short, the proposed system broadcasts a secure identifier that changes every 15 minutes over Bluetooth to all the devices around it. Your phone collects these identifiers and stores them locally. When someone tests positive, their local health authority will certify that diagnosis and upload that user’s list of prior IDs to a central system. Your phone will download and analyze that list, and if it sees a match, will warn you to get tested and quarantine yourself.
The system has been designed to keep privacy at the forefront, primarily by requiring any match detection to happen on your own device, and by preventing a map of all connections from being collected at any central point. It also has been designed to prevent abuse, in that you must have a verified diagnosis to trigger any alerts. (It would otherwise be trivial to hang out in a crowded place all day, like an airport or Times Square, and put thousands of people into an unnecessary quarantine.) Both Apple and Google also state unequivocally that this information can’t be used for any other purposes, particularly ad targeting.
It’s rare that we see a system like this designed with so many externalities and safety checks, and we’re cautiously optimistic about its potential. While it may be too late for contact tracing to be helpful in slowing the current wave of cases, tech like this may be critical in helping manage the next phase of semi-isolation when many are returning to work or social life while still being cautious about possible infection.
Apple and Google have a clever way of encouraging people to install contact-tracing apps
By building contact-tracing into their operating systems, the companies could make a difference in the global pandemic response.
4: Clues from the current global crisis to solving the next one
An analysis by CarbonBrief, a UK-based news outlet focused on climate and emissions, has found that the widespread shutdowns and stay-at-home orders will have reduced carbon emissions by over 5.5% in 2020. Reducing emissions is key to keeping global warming at or near a 1.5 degrees Celsius level, one at which scientists believe the impacts will be manageable. The trouble is that to reach that level of reduced warming, the world would need to reduce emissions by 7.6% every year for the next decade.
The immediate reaction is: “We turned everything off and this was all that happened?” However, as this article summarizing the findings points out, “The relationship between economic declines and emissions dips will also depend on which industries are ultimately hit hardest… Hospitality and entertainment, for instance, could see greater losses than the more carbon-intensive power sector.” (Emphasis ours.)
Power use and generation during these lockdowns has not decreased significantly, and the mix of clean and dirty sources is the same now as it was before the pandemic hit. Therefore, this news could be looked at in a much more positive light, namely: to get to the CO2 reductions needed to avert a global warming crisis, we don’t need to dramatically alter our way of life. We may simply need to focus on the few concentrated emitters, namely our power plants, and convert to a cleaner electrical grid.
The coronavirus may cut climate emissions more than any war or recession did.
But even that wont be enough to prevent dangerous levels of global warming. And carbon pollution will bounce back as soon as the economy does.
www.technologyreview.com • Share
5: Urban design in response to pandemics
In this newsletter, we often write about how design both shapes and reflects behavior. The current pandemic has drawn particular attention to the design of cities and how those designs intersect with both community needs and public health concerns. We see concern about urban density in a moment where avoiding contact with other people is critical. We hear frustration about the amount of space we’ve dedicated to cars, when there is suddenly an urgent need for pedestrians and bicyclists to claim more of that space. This piece in The Guardian dives into the potential ways that urban design might be transformed by Covid-19, from the tensions around density (as it affects public health and climate change in opposing ways) to the possible need for increased digital infrastructure. It also has some fascinating details about city features that were developed in direct response to past pandemics, from the plague’s effects on city laws in ancient Athens to the creation of Victoria Embankment in London as a response to 19th-century cholera outbreaks.
Cities after coronavirus: how Covid-19 could radically alter urban life | World news | The Guardian
Pandemics have always shaped cities – and from increased surveillance to ‘de-densification’ to new community activism, Covid-19 is doing it already
6: Our video games, ourselves
If you’ve been anywhere near the internet lately (and that’s the only place any of us have been), you’ve probably heard about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a recent game released by Nintendo. Even if video games aren’t your thing, they can be fascinating as lenses into the world and what we value. Our friend Ian Bogost has a thoughtful analysis of the game, its economic and social structures, and why those structures might be especially comforting in the current moment:
“Nobody really wants to live a pastoral-capitalist equilibrium of humdrum labor—unless that’s what everyone wants, actually, and not even so secretly. Civic life, after all, coheres not in abstract fantasies about politician-heroes, but in habitual practices that take place in real communities. All video games aestheticize busywork. But few make it feel like freedom.”
Animal Crossing Isn’t Escapist; It’s Political
In the midst of a pandemic, it’s delightful to imagine doing whatever you like without worrying about making a living.
One remote-work thing
A tragedy in two acts:
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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