Technoccult

After posting this, I decide to rename it from Media Diet to Mutation Vectors because it sounds cooler

Journalism

Hey, look it’s a new week already and once again I haven’t posted any new articles here on Technoccult. You can always tell when I’m having trouble meeting my deadlines for work by the dearth of posts here.

This week’s must read is Betsy Haibel’s epic article about the technology industry’s utter disregard for getting your consent to do… well almost anything. Companies will sign you up for spam e-mails, let people tag you in photos, gather your location information and so much more — and it’s all opt-out, not opt-in.

The article was published by Model View Culture, which publishes lots of “must read” articles critiquing the tech industry.

Speaking of the tech industry, my friend and Mindful Cyborgs co-host Alex Williams launched a site this week called The New Stack, all about the technology behind the technology that we use today. I’m doing a series of guest posts there on the history of this so-called new stack to figure out what, if anything, is actually new about it. The first one is a history of scale-out architecture. If that puts you to sleep, don’t worry. It’s geeky even by my standards. You might be more interested in reading Curt Hopkins’ articles “New Tech Needed to Stop Train Crashes” and “Drones Muster Out and Head for Wine Country.” Curt’s an amazing writer, I wish I could write half as well as him, or at least think up story ideas as good as his.

Elsewhere on the web, Jon Evans thinks technology may destroy capitalism. Well, you know I’d be down, though of course I always worry that we’ll end up with something worse than capitalism. But I’m also not so sure what we’re seeing happening is going to displace capitalism. After all the sharing economy is anything but. And while I am hoping for what Jon calls the low-scarcity future, I fear that climate change, ocean acidification and peak soil may lead to even more scarcity. The Windup Girl is a frighteningly plausible scenario (see last week’s Media Diet).

While we’re waiting to find out what happens to capitalism, Seattle is considering raising its minimum wage to $15. Jordan Weissmann thinks higher minimum wages are a good thing, but worries that Seattle might be raising its wage too high too fast. I also rather like the idea of higher wages for America’s most disadvantaged works, but I would have to agree that going from $9.32 to $15 overnight might be a little too quick. But as Weissmann tells us at the end of his article:

To his credit, Murray’s is trying to implement the idea gradually. Under his proposal, businesses would have between three and seven years to phase in the new minimum, depending on their size and whether employees get health care coverage or tips. Through 2024, some businesses will also be able to count $3 worth of tips or benefits toward the $15 total. By introducing the change over time, the city will give businesses leeway to adjust, if they can.

Of course that still might not be enough time to absorb an almost 50% increase in wages, but kinda weird that he didn’t mention the timeline sooner.

It’s hard to find a job that pays more than minimum wage these days, and the ones you can find often really suck. Even the ones that are supposed to be good. For example, The Daily Beast says being a primary care physician really sucks. My dad’s a family practitioner and he says that article is right on the money. Also, it turns out that doctoring has surpassed dentistry in a ranking of the most suicide prone professions, at least among white males. (But marine engineers are the most suicidal of all.) Please don’t kill your self, Dad.

Ten thousand people still die of asbestos in the United States every year. That’s about the same number of people that were killed by gun violence last year. And yet we’re still using asbestos for some purposes, and even exporting to other countries. Mosiac has the dirt.

If you read Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs, you’ve probably noticed I’m ripping off his style. I might continue to do that until I get back in the habit of posting links here on a more than weekly basis, and/or I find my own style. In the meantime, if you want to read a great, near daily thing sort of like this only better, check out Today in Tabs.

Comics

Everyone’s been recommending Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals, so this week I finally read the first issue, which I bought months ago. It was pretty good, but it didn’t really make me want to keep reading it. I’ll probably give it a couple more issues, though.

Today I wandered down to Floating World for free comics day. By the time I got there there just a few local indie comics left, which suited me just fine. I picked up Runner Runner # 3 from Tugboat Press, Courtney Crumrin # 1 from Oni and Barrio Mothes, which was co-published by like four different publishers, including Floating World. They all look great.

I also bought the Multiple Warheads collection by Brandon Graham and the Bartkira exhibition book, which looks amazing. If you want to know more about Bartkira, check out this interview and these two Tumblrs.

I’m really behind on reading comics, but then again, like Zack Soto:

TV

Been catching up on Parks and Recreation this week. It’s also refreshing chaser to all the violent, nihilistic shows I watch.

Apps

I’m a big fan of an app called Freedom, which kills your internet connection for a set amount of time. The only way to get your connection back before the time is up is to restart your computer.

Unfortunately, it’s not yet available for Linux, and although it’s totally worth the $10, it would be nice if the source code were available. But free/open source software purists are in luck: there’s now a F/OSS alternative for Linux called ColettesHusband.

I hosed up my Linux Mint partition so I haven’t been able to test it yet. Looks like it’s a bash script that disables your ethernet and wifi drivers for a set amount of time. I’m not sure if it, like Freedom, will stop you from re-enabling the drivers manually without having to restart your computer.

BTW, a Linux version of Freedom is in beta, and the new version adds nifty new features like scheduling your disconnections in advance, so don’t count it out of the running yet.

Hi everyone. I’ve decided to try doing a weekly round-up of what I’ve been reading, listening to and watching. I’m going to try to post it to the blog every Saturday, which means it will go out to the mailing list on Sundays. It probably won’t always be so long. We’ll see if I actually keep it up or not.

Journalism

I usually post what I’ve read and found interesting lately to my Twitter account and/or here on Twitter, but apparently I didn’t find much of interest this week other than Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ takedown of Jeff Atwood’s perhaps well intentioned, but still pretty awful, post on what men can do about sexism in the industry.

I also read “Leftism and the Banausic Thinker: From Plato to Verso” by David Auerbach. TL;DR: Auerbach says leftist groups fixate on vaguely defined grand conspiracies like “neolibralism,” and tend to be more about forming cliques based perceived ideological purity than about getting shit done in their communities. Not exactly a new argument. A more interesting question, to me anyway, is whether the right is much different. The vast conspiracy angle is always there, be it communism, godlessness, or The Cathedral. But is there less in-fighting on the right? Is there anything to learn about solidarity from the right, or is all politics and activism doomed to pointless factionalism and the narcissism of small differences?

I was going to write for Wired about the FCC’s new proposed internet rules that would, apparently, do away with net neutrality, but we didn’t really end up having anything to add to the conversation. Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica, though, pointed out what a departure the reported proposal is from what the FCC has previously advocated, and Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM got some details I haven’t seen anywhere else, including confirmation the original Wall Street Journal story that started this whole thing was accurate. (If you don’t know at all what I’m talking about, maybe start with the WSJ story).

Oh, and speaking of the WSJ, they are, oddly enough, hosting a website on the Kowloon Walled City. It’s exactly the sort of Flash-driven, pointlessly pseudo-interactive type of site that drives me nuts: music that autoplays, CPU-gobbling animations that add nothing to the stories, confusingly organized content. I haven’t started exploring it, but there’s probably some interesting stuff in there.

Even though I co-host one, I don’t really listen to podcasts. I’m not sure to fit them into my life now that I hardly ever drive. But I wanted to mention that Justin Picard and Georgina Voss started a podcast about design, futurism and high weirdness called Gin and Innovation that has guests like Deb Chachra, Scott Smith and Eleanor Saitta.

Books

I recently finished reading The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I liked it, though sometimes the dense prose got in the way of the story telling, and the female parts are at best underdeveloped and at worst, well, bad. But there’s brilliant world building here and some challenging characters. Bacigalupi also published two short stories set in this world, which I haven’t read yet: “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man,” both of which you can find for free on his website.

Comics:

I thought this little web comic by Steve Schaberg was great:

Read the whole thing.

I’m way behind on my comics reading, but I’ve been thinking about how series like Sandman, The Invisibles and Transmetropolitan really represented their respective zeitgeists in some way. They were just so plugged into cultural currents.

So I asked on Twitter which contemporary ongoing creator owned series was the most zeitgeisty. My candidates were: Zero, The Movement, The Private Eye, Prophet, Saga and Templar, Arizona. I’ve not actually read any Saga yet, so I’m not actually sure about it, and though Prophet feels really “now” for some reason, it’s not exactly plugged into contemporary cultural trends. And I hadn’t realized that The Movement has been cancelled.

The crowdsourced recommendations were: COPRA (which I’ve mentioned here before), Lazarus, Manhattan Projects … and even though it’s not creator owned, a couple people mentioned Hawkeye (actually, neither is Prophet, really, nor was Sandman). Of these, I’ve only read COPRA and the first few issues of Hawkeye.

Television and Films:

I’ve not been watching many new movies lately, but a couple months ago I watched Electrick Children on Netflix and liked it. It’s one of those films where the acting and execution carry a weakly developed plot.

I’m catching up season five of Justified right now.

Music:

Weirdly, I’ve not been listening to much music at all lately. Not since December, when The Soft Moon (I prefer their first album) and Chrome (who put out a lost tracks compilation last year) were in heavy rotation.

According to Last.fm, Gridlock and Zomby are about the only things I’ve listened to in the last three months.