you forgot the best part tho

“Consider two things in tandem. First, people in wealthier neighbourhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to parkland, on top of the face that such neighbourhoods are often in the hills or by the water. […] Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps. Loren Brichter, the engineer who invested the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter feeds, regards his invention with penitence: “Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.” […] In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention. One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book - about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space - means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality. By the same token, there are many different places where manifest dismantling can begin to work. Wherever we are, and what ever privileges we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on. Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take. Other times, we can actively look for ways to impact things like the addictive design of technology, but also environmental politics, labour rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism initiatives, measures for parks and open spaces, and habitat restoration - understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance. As in any ecology, the fruits of our efforts within any of these fields may well reach beyond to the others.”

imagine being on your little dried peapod shell of a boat with your fragile little human self and then

“This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site—it doesn’t matter whether you are Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge—you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them. I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas—the messages implicit in these mediums—are wrong. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting.”

people get specific as they age

A question I get asked a lot while working at a public library is "how do you deal with homeless people?"

I bring this up because today we had a man come in. He stopped at the desk, pulled up a chair and said "I'm newly homeless and was living in my car. I'm disabled. It was impounded. It's raining. I don't have a phone and I don't know where to go tonight."