November 1, 2016

“ISIS commanders can discover, in real time, where the Iraqis are advancing; they can watch their mortars landing, and recalibrate them to be more accurate next time. Why incur all this risk, unless the live streams aren’t a minor feature of the battle, but somehow the whole point?” Live streams from Mosul are mostly idiot commentators and spam porn bots; the battle is a spectacle strangely unrelated to the audience. / The Baffler

1. Everything that happened in the art world last week. Somebody spent $22,000 on a naked statue of Donald Trump. / The Creators Project

2. The Podesta emails demonstrate how America’s elite look after one another (and not you). / The Guardian

3. Medical students roamed the streets last night, asking people to become organ donors. See also: “Why Singapore Wants Its Food Courts to Be Run by Machines, Not People.” / CBC, Bloomberg

4. Cholbani founder draws threats from the alt-right for hiring recent immigrants. If of interest and you’ve got 20 minutes, read this profile of the alt-right’s chief troll Mike Cernovich. / The New York Times, The New Yorker

5. A brief ode to the satisfaction of filling a woodshed. / Adventure Journal

“Nobody ever tried to change the world with a Vine. But it served as the best place to get away from the world for a while.” Vine was a safe harbor for black creativity, especially black comedy. / New York Times

“Choose what you pay” strategies have mostly been used by charities and artists, but now are being deployed to sell shoes. / Marginal Revolution

In case you were curious, here’s what it takes to clean up Burning Man—including a nine-mile-long fence that collects windblown trash. (Photo credit: Secret Artist.) / High Country News, flickr.com

“On days when the smog is bad, we avoid going outside. We make sure the windows are sealed shut. If I see an open window or door in the hallway, I try to close it. But some windows are too high up for me to reach.” Residents of cities like Beijing, New Delhi, Hanoi, and the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator write about the toll air pollution takes on daily life. / The New York Times

Seven of the 10 worst cities in America for air pollution are in California, per the American Lung Association. / lung.org

China leads the world in deaths linked to air pollution, with some 1.6 million a year. / BBC

The air quality in most of America’s major cities, Los Angeles notwithstanding, is largely safe. For instance, in Chicago, which has the highest amount of air particulates of any large American city, residents of majority-Latino neighborhoods Pilsen, Little Village, and the far Southeast Side have been fighting—with mixed success at best—against polluters and the city bureaucracies that have allowed them to pollute neighborhoods for decades. / The Economist, South Side Weekly

If the earthquakes weren’t enough, America’s love of fracking is hurting progress we’ve made in limiting other emissions. The entire process releases a noxious cocktail of gases into the air, predominantly methane, and many fracking sites are much closer to residential areas than, say, the oil wells of There Will Be Blood. / pubs.acs.org, onlinelibrary.wiley.com, nrdc.org

In the last decade, 40 states have cut the budgets of their environmental departments, with four—Illinois, New Mexico, Georgia, and North Carolina—slashing 30 percent or more. / Center for Public Integrity

The exploitation of digital labor goes further than allowing platforms to custom-tailor ads. It also greases the wheels of cultural appropriation, as shown in this illustrative profile of Vine stars who created dances and coined slogans but never owned their own work. / thefader.com

A user is worth about $3.82 to Zuckerberg’s company. / Recode

“Capital used force to enclose common land, put starving peasants to work for a wage, and colonize the South. Today it also uses ‘lolcat’ videos. Economic historians may credit the casually dressed bosses of Silicon Valley with the creation of a world-group of cheerfully dispossessed laborers, willing co-producers of the services they consume.” Data is Latin for “given,” but it is in fact stolen. There are only two ways forward: Users can broker their own data, or the state can engage to redirect value back to its owners. / Le Monde Diplomatique

Check out all three parts: “Immaterial Labor and Data Harvesting,” “Human Data Banks and Algorithmic Labor,” and “Quantified Lives on Discount.” / Share Lab

The Immaterial Labour Union zine riffs on everything from the social graph to how to leave Facebook on your own terms. / The Immaterial Labour Union zine

“To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.” Instead of Oz behind the curtain, a million users lend the web its mystique. Computation under capitalism doesn’t subsume social relations, it amplifies them. / e-flux

Not the “changing fashions in snoods, wimples, hijabs and snorkel parkas,” but what and who is under a hood, w/r/t identity, power, and politics, as found in Alison Kinney’s new book Hood. / London Review of Books, alisonkinney.com

Photographs and history from the legendary cemeteries of Los Angeles. “Hollywood Forever Cemetery is surrounded by a special LA kind of ugliness, but inside its walls, it’s lush and colorful and crowded and fun.” / Curbed

For some reason, anonymous foreign spies and computer scientists have chosen this week to go public with their Trump-related scoops. In Slate, Franklin Foer reported on a “preponderence of evidence but no smoking gun” that Trump has a private email server for communicating with a Russian bank. / Slate

In this video we were surprised by three things. One: humans “highline” without actually connecting their highline to things other than humans. / Wikipedia