Dries Depoorter built software to scan online public cameras and link them to geotagged instagram posts from the same location. Basically finding people from a single instagram photo and potentially tracking them across any public (or not) camera out there. Technically impressive, yet disturbing.
There was a video on the page too, but it seems to have been pulled due to a copyright claim from Earthcam who, I imagine, weren't very happy about their cameras being used for this.
Douglas Rushkoff on the ultra-wealthy trying to figure out how the world will end (because of them) and how to dominate through it. Quite depressing, if unsurprising.
Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
I'm reading the Bright Green Lies book and found this thought-provoking discussion with one of the authors.
As he says, there's definitely an issue with the environmental movement these days being more interested in keeping modern civilization on its current course, rather than trying to protect the actual planet itself like it used to.
And the dominant blind faith in "green" technology does tend to make me uneasy.
I'd never though of it that way, but all these sites pushing conspiracy theories, hoaxes and other lies are a great trap for catching and selling a gullible audience:
Jones has profited and is likely to continue to profit from his labors in the Lie Economy, the marketplace where gullible viewers are sorted from the skeptical and delivered to advertisers who make the most of their naïveté.
On the pointlessness of ego-based architecture:
Was anyone actually impressed by this building as a feat of engineering when it went up in 2009? Obviously not — by this point, it is well understood that anything in architecture is possible if you have enough money, and the Burj Khalifa cost over $1.5 billion dollars.
I knew they trucked tons of sewage out of that building due to the lack of infrastructure. I didn't know that close to a third of it was basically hollow:
The city of Dubai did not green light a building that extends a half-mile into the air because of a pressing need for residences in downtown Dubai. To the contrary, the top 800 feet (244 meters) of the building, or 29% of the structure’s total height, is devoted to non-usable floors.
Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of: You exist. You are seen.
This really hit home: Ezra Klein, echoing Marshall McLuhan, on how the medium does shape us, not just the message.
