Thread by @Kpaxs

If you are interested in urbanism and technology, I highly recommend "Kneeling Bus" newsletter. A delightful short read each week.

I will share some highlights while reading through the archives.

All credit goes to @kneelingbus.

https://twitter.com/kneelingbus/status/1093394495767539714

In the future, all commerce will be indistinguishable from ransomware.

Most digital environments are also panopticons, in which some unseen cabal with admin privileges can observe your every move.

We all spend our free time generating valuable data for large corporate internet platforms on a pro bono basis. The line between working and not working seems blurrier than ever.

The good always arrives bundled with the bad.

The first existential law of any platform is that it needs you to stick around.

Disconnecting from the internet has become a privilege, an inversion of the web's earlier era.

Typing out Google searches will soon become obsolete, tomorrow's version of printing out directions from MapQuest.

"A lot of people have ideas about how to make transportation better: self-driving cars, hyperloops, and don’t get me wrong, I love all of that stuff, but it’s 2017, and the biggest trend in transportation is that it’s a lot easier to move bits around than atoms."

— M. Zuckerberg

If you have a hammer, it's tempting to view every problem as a nail, and it's similarly appealing to believe that most of our toughest, most persistent challenges have software solutions for that reason.

The relationship between cities and new technology has always been complicated: the heavy, complacent built environment is characterized by inertia, and as thousands of forces are constantly trying to change that landscape, it stubbornly tries to stay the same.

We're running iOS 11 on an iPhone 4. You can hail a taxi faster than ever but it's still stuck in traffic once you get in; scooters are a way to extract slightly more value from the infrastructure that exists.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Twitter is the worst social media platform except for all the others.

"Disruption" is just a more novel way of describing a particularly rapid and aggressive version of what the new has always done to the old.

Now, moving fast and breaking things often means breaking people, institutions, or even countries.

People are a problem from which no medium has ever been safe.

Branding is the artificial process of re-wrapping goods with qualitative, aesthetic surfaces.

"Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going." — Le Corbusier

Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going.

One reason there's so much enthusiasm for blockchain technology is that it's one of the few high-profile developments that at least offers the possibility of an alternate paradigm: something closer to utopia than ordering another hairdryer to your house.

When Walmart comes to town, you're fortunate if you're in a position to not shop there; Amazon escalates that conflict to a nearly impossible intensity.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print.

Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.

AI is frequently just more mundane digital plumbing, rather than magic.

There is one broad category of tasks that artificial intelligence is unquestionably good at already: reflecting existing human behavior back to us, often in unflattering ways.

“In the societies of control one is never finished with anything.”

— Deleuze

When every image lasts forever, we lose the privilege of choosing what to remember.