The digital hippies want to integrate life and work—but not in a good way
WeWork as the new company town:
In WeWork’s future, the hastily privatised public space is returned to citizens. However, it comes back as a commercial service provided by a lavishly funded data company, not as a right. Meetup’s civil society will keep on talking, inside WeWork’s buildings. But the struggle against alienation will now consist of applying even more data analytics and nudging to the tortured souls of overworked cognitive workers, who, in escaping alienated workplaces in the comfort of makerspaces and face-to-face meetings, have discovered that the workplaces have colonised their non-work lives instead.
Julia Ioffe on Vladimir Putin
This extended Frontline interview with The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe is extremely informative. This is probably more than you wanted to know about Vladimir Putin, but it’s helpful to understand how Russian-style politics has taken root here in the US.
Thursday, Thursday, Friday
Three things coming up later this week in NYC:
- I’m gonna be speaking at an event at NYU on Thursday afternoon: Tactical Tech in NYC: Alternative Networks and Practical Privacy
- Then I’m planning to go to this Zeynep Tufekci conversation afterward: Civic Hall Presents: The Tech and Power Series
- On Friday morning, around 8:30am, I’ll be at Academy Restaurant (near BAM) for GeoBreakfast.
On Behalf of Life
I helped build a website with the Other EPA encouraging you to submit a Public Comment on the EPA’s draft 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, which presently has no mention of Climate Change.
The deadline to submit your Public Comment is tonight, 11:59pm ET!
Never Use Futura
Khoi Vinh on the book Never Use Futura:
I’m so happy to see this new book by designer, writer, and historian Douglas Thomas all about the typeface Futura which, it’s worth noting, predated Helvetica by three full decades—and it looks as beautiful and timely as ever.
Futura is probably my favorite typeface that ships with macOS by default. It’s one of the few bundled with an OS with more weights than just Regular and Bold.
Grid Corrections
Grid Corrections shows, as Curt Meine puts it, “places where theory and reality meet.”
Geoff Manaugh, writing for Travel + Leisure:
De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth. You could drive out there your whole life, de Ruijter realized, and not realize that certain stop signs and intersections exist not because of eccentric real estate deals, but because they are mathematical devices used to help planners wrap a rectilinear planning scheme onto the surface of a spherical planet. In order to avoid large-scale distortion, the Jeffersonian grid—shorthand for the founding father’s 18th-century geometric vision of six-square-mile township parcels, intended to guarantee equal and democratic land-distribution nationwide—is occasionally forced to go askew.
How gerrymandered is a district?
Michal Migurski is working on a project for measuring legislative gerrymandering. Redistricting shenanigans can be detected from current, historical, and proposed legislative districts.
PlanScore is doing two things to address partisan gerrymandering.
We are creating score pages for district plans to provide instant, real-time analysis of a plan’s fairness. Each district plan will be evaluated for its population, demographic, partisan, and geometric character in a single place, with backing methodology and data provided so you can understand the number. We’ll publish historical scores back to the 1970s for context, current scores of proposed plans for voters and journalists, and dynamic scores of new plans for legislative staff who are designing tomorrow’s plans.
We are also assembling a collection of underlying electoral data from sources like Open Elections, elections-geodata, and other parallel efforts. Our goal is to provide valid scores for new plans in any state. As we await the outcomes of gerrymandering challenges in Wisconsin and North Carolina, voters and legislative staff in other states are wondering how to apply new ideas to their own plans. In 2020, everyone will have to redraw their maps. PlanScore will be a one-stop shop for district plan analysis.