Living in the Netherlands now for over two years I cannot begin to explain how amazing the cycling infrastructure is. It’s in the little things such as the traffic lights, as explained in the following video:
Three new videos from Vox give a good synopisis of some of the events playing in the world right now:
Each video is about a very different, yet at the same time these three phenomena are linked by common themes. Which lives matter? Who decides? And who decides who decides?
From an article The New York Times titled “Big Tech’s Domination of Business Reaches New Heights”:
The tech companies’ dominance of the stock market is propelled by their unprecedented reach into our lives, shaping how we work, communicate, shop and relax. That has only deepened during the pandemic, and as people shop more frequently on Amazon, click on a Google or Facebook ad or pay up for an iPhone, the companies receive a greater share of spending in the economy and earn ever larger profits. This is why investors have flocked to those stocks this year at the expense of the scores of companies struggling in the health crisis, and are betting that their position will be unassailable for years.
The Markup reports on some internal documents of Google they have obtained that help train employees to not use certain words which could trigger regulators:
As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual. (…) The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.
My knowledge of the British suffragettes seems to be completely wrong. Fascinating how their movements used different tactics to draw attention on the street and from the camera.
British suffragettes in the early 20th century used spectacle and drama to draw attention to their fight to win women the vote. They delivered public speeches, marched, displayed colorful banners, and got thrown in jail, all in an effort to pressure legislators to extend suffrage to women.
Sarah Jeong at The Verge writes about what she calls the ideology “information-nationalism.” According to her this ideology has two main assumptions:
- When your country acknowledges human rights abuses, you are made weak
- You can weaken rival nation-states by exposing their human rights abuses
And that information-nationalism “is not about mythologies or misinformation. When you play the game of information-nationalism, you don’t slander your enemies; you tell the truth about them, while hiding the truth about yourself.”
The album Your Queen is a Reptile from Sons of Kemet has a fantastic vibe and energy. I’ve been listening for a while now, but I only now discovered this great promo clip for the album.
Another example of a controversy around surveillance practices. Adam Molina at Soundguys “Headphones are collecting too much personal data”. He seems to balance some of the conveniences that surveillance capitalist apps bring, but he is dismayed when he doesn’t see how his headphones tracking his music could benefit him=
Melissa Vogel and Adam Gamwell at Anthropology News write about the value of anthropology to business and how this value can be articulated in language a business understands.
As anthropologists, our approach to human insights research and analysis offers businesses a unique way to understand patterns of behavior and meaning making that differs from quantitative data analysis. For example, ethnography of tech industry consumer needs conducted by anthropologists, who use cross-cultural knowledge, cultural relativism, and a holistic approach, will offer businesses a way to understand consumer needs that is not often present in a management-, psychology-, or even sociology-based perspective. These insights then allow businesses to provide better products and services.