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I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim telescopes through each others' windows, because only creeps do that.
But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.
They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future
we want to live in.
This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. [...]
this is a great way of thinking about technology, and it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's essay about linux vs apple. it ultimately comes down to power: how much control do you have over your device, versus how much does it control your life?
"The elevators work. They just give priority to the market-rent side. You'll get an elevator when none of these folks need one."
Salima grasped the system and its logic in an instant. The only reason she'd been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they'd make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build fifty stories instead of the thirty that the other buildings in this neighborhood rose to. There was a lot of this sort of thing, and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units, what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing.
But now she saw an important truth: even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it [...] the logic of a mulish child who wanted to make their displeasure known.
the writing style is heavy-handed but this system is cool (in a chillingly realistic dystopian way)
Having a place to live that was truly hers made a huge difference in her life. Something about the stability, the confidence---hell, just having a reliable place to do laundry every night---it all added up to the sense that she was finally exiting the endless limbo she'd lived in all her life. Her earliest memories were of being on the move with her parents, one camp and then another, then an uncle's house for a while, then another camp, then temporary apartments, then the crossing to America, the camp, the shelter. All that time, she'd had the sense that her life was on hold, that she was floating around like a leaf in the breeze, sometimes snagged on a branch and sometimes lofted up to the clouds, but never touching down, never coming to rest. It meant that she never really thought about her life more than a few days in advance. Now, in her own home, she was thinking about what her future held.
this is written in such a generic way (i feel like a writer who'd actually lived this could have made it so much more colourful and powerful) but it's a good encapsulation of the importance of stable housing at least
[...] After years of spinning in place, she had finally started her life in earnest, with a place and a job and friends who were nearly family. This was a reminder that her current life was a tissue-thin surface covering the world she'd lived in before.
man this paragraph is just crying out for some poetry. it's such an evocative topic! why is the writing so prosaic?
[...] It was pretty esoteric, this idea of bankruptcies by distant companies. What did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke? Did they see them as just weirdly nonfunctional gadgets they had to work around, like the bad touchscreens at the shelter? Or did they see them as the enemy, something that they were at war with, the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will?
[...] They've been watching the darknet boards, they know that everyone's been figuring out how to jailbreak their shit while we've been getting restarted, and they figure all those people could be customers, but instead of paying for food we sell them, they'd pay us to use food someone else sold them."
Salima almost laughed. It was a crime if she did it, a product if they sold it to her. Everything could be a product.
charging for jailbreaks, this is pretty genius tbh. great demonstration of how the legal system (especially IP) artificially creates the conditions necessary for the market to flourish (reminds me of Geoff Mann on neoliberalism as both deregulation and reregulation)
Salima had thought of Wye as her ally, every bit as offended by the locked-down world of Dorchester Towers as she was. But Wye had been working long hours for Boulangism and its new sister companies. She thought the problem was that Salima didn't want to get into trouble. Salima had been thinking that, too. But that wasn't the problem. The whole rotten business, that was the problem.
this isn't super well written, but the lesson is good: tech workers who aren't yet fully fed up still want to believe that their work is going into something good. what does it take to fully disabuse them of that notion, so that their last tendrils of faith in the legitimacy of their work wither away?
[...] a kid who'd learned to search the darknet for ways to control technology designed to control them. A kid who was outraged at being asked to forget how to do that and go back to being meekly controlled.
Would a kid like that ever work on commission, installing official unlocking codes in the poor-floor apartments of Dorchester Towers? Was there enough money in the world?
And if there was, did she want to be the one who used that money to convince a kid to give up on that uncompromising ferocity?
"[...] I understand your idea here, that you're selling us more freedom. but that's only because our appliances take away so much freedom to begin with, and then sell it back."
"But no one forced you to choose Boulangism. You chose a product that came with restrictions, and in return., you got a deal on your rent."
[...]
Salima managed a tight little smile. "You keep talking about choosing. This is the only place I could get into, and it took months. How is that a choice?"
"You were living somewhere before this place, right?"
"A refugee shelter."
"You could have chosen to stay there, right?"
She wanted these people gone. "I don't think that is much of a choice."
He shook his head. "The point is that you had a choice, and that's because appliances like ours made it economical for landlords to build subsidy units."
[...]
"We want to help you people, let you get more out of your lives, give you more choices."
What about the choice to jailbreak my things? She didn't ask it.
the classic legitimation strategy: create the conditions where people have no choice but to "choose" your product, and you can justify any shitty deal by reminding them that they "chose" your product (see also: Uber drivers)
and lol @ the idea that something needs to be "economical" (through generating extra revenue streams ... ie kickbacks) for private landlords to build and lease cheaper units. what a fantastic argument for public housing