Hello from London, lovely friends. The chorus of glorious birdsong that recently enveloped the city has been all too quickly replaced by other people’s barbecues. A high-standard barbecue is a glorious thing, but a firelighter-drenched cremation in a foil tray leaves everything smelling like a carpet fire. Heat not flame, people, heat not flame.
🕰 Why time feels so weird in 2020: Some days seem to pass very slowly while some weeks, and even months, fly by. A set of perception tests illustrate some factors that can distort our sense of time.
🥚 This egg-shaped tiny home is powered by wind and solar energy and collects and filters its own water supply: Ecocapsule creates off-grid capable, wind and solar-powered tiny homes that can be placed on a trailer base. The tiny home was first designed for an architecture and design competition. Although it didn’t win, it was selected as one of the most interesting designs and received enough positive feedback to encourage its designers to build the unit.
😷 Sexologist Uses 4 Decades Of Research On Condom Use To Show How To Get More People To Wear Face Masks: Jill McDevitt recently made a Facebook post highlighting how four decades worth of research on condom use, listing ten tips on how to approach the problem.
🔌 The internet, mon amour: The pandemic has driven many of us even further into the embrace of the internet. But can you live a truly fulfilled life online?
🚐 This is a golden era for vans: In May, the UK’s top-selling car was the Tesla Model 3. But the decline in new car sales has been so severe that the Tesla was outsold by both the Ford Transit Custom and the Mercedes Sprinter. Hint hint.
🧠 Common mental processes often underlie different diagnoses: Our system for diagnosing mental disorders doesn’t work. The transdiagnostic model offers a humane, clinically sound alternative.
🤖 Humans Are the Signal, but Tech Treats Us as the Noise: Douglas Rushkoff writes that when we autotune reality to digital perfection, what matters about human beings gets lost.
📸 Celebs with Ghislaine: I almost can’t tell whether this Instagram account is attempting to incriminate celebrities by photographic association, or exonerate Maxwell by showing how frequently a socialite is photographed with all and sundry.
There goes the neighbourhood
Technology advances in ways that are hard to foresee. The door-knocker became a bell, which became an intercom, which became an internet-connected surveillance camera. Each incremental change seems innocuous enough, but are we capable of adjusting to living amongst technological ubiquity?
Hyperlocal social network Nextdoor is supposed to connect neighbourhoods. It should be a great place for finding reliable tradespeople, solving practical problems like exchanging unwanted items and generally making the places we live a little friendlier.
In reality, Nextdoor is a hateful, fearful place: a stream of small grievances, reports of nearby burglaries, car break-ins and people “acting suspiciously”. It takes the bad things in this world and arranges them upon a stage within spitting distance of where you sleep at night.
Then there’s Ring, the wifi-enabled video doorbell passed up by Shark Tank investors and later acquired by Amazon. It began by solving the practical problem of seeing who’s at the door from afar, but it has morphed into a socialised private surveillance network.
Innovations such as these are double-edged swords. People buy into them for practical reasons such as tackling stolen packages, but then such surveillance transforms suburbia. They contribute to making it harder to move around a city privately.
Further, neither Nextdoor or Ring have sparkling civil rights records. Ring routinely partners shares data with law enforcement. Without proper moderation, Nextdoor has a racism problem. These businesses are slow to catch on when their behaviours are objectionable, and we as citizens are slow to see big pictures. For now, thank goodness for grassroots activists like @bestofnextdoor for applying the pressure of scrutiny.