Bring Together Iconic and Lesser-Known Works
It's happening! The Real Future Fair, our biggest event of the year, is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. When I took this gig at Fusion, this is the sort of event I imagined being able to stage: a diverse party where the people doing the work of technology and culture get together to discuss and critique the world we're building. There'll be technologists and artists and writers all together talking about the futures they want. Over the coming few weeks, I'll share some links from the work of the people that are coming. In the meantime: go get some tickets.
1. The Intercept publishes a cache of documents from a new whistleblower about America's drone war.
"The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides."
2. Geneticists reconstruct neighborhood-level details about New York population.
"The genetic data, which includes about one million markers across the genome, is compared among individuals, among populations, and between current and ancestral populations to determine hidden patterns of relatedness, sort individuals into groups that share genetic characteristics, and find correlations with genes of medical relevance... The researchers have also genetically compared groups of New Yorkers with ancestral populations outside of the city, producing analyses that enrich scientific understanding of historical events. An example is the Garifuna people of Central and South America, a population that originated in the late 1600s when an African slave ship foundered off the coast of Venezuela. In the years that followed, the survivors of that event reproduced with Native populations, and many of their descendants form communities in New York today."
3. Americans are a weird people. We like placebos. A lot.
"Drug companies have a problem: they are finding it ever harder to get painkillers through clinical trials. But this isn't necessarily because the drugs are getting worse. An extensive analysis of trial data1 has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger over time, making it harder to prove a drug’s advantage over placebo. The change in response to placebo treatments for pain, discovered by researchers in Canada, holds true only for US clinical trials. 'We were absolutely floored when we found out,' says Jeffrey Mogil, who directs the pain-genetics lab at McGill University in Montreal and led the analysis. Simply being in a US trial and receiving sham treatment now seems to relieve pain almost as effectively as many promising new drugs."
4. The wild experiments of Mexico City's 1990s artists.
"Strange Currencies will present an alternative, lesser-known history of 1990s Mexico City that has not been presented in previous exhibitions and will recapture the funkiness and dynamic spirit that defined the decade’s diffuse and vibrant cultural scene. In order to place the artworks on view into context, the exhibition will also include archival materials and documents, including photographs, video footage and printed media, a range of underground and artist-produced publications and a listening station featuring an artist-curated mix of music from the 1990s. It will bring together iconic and lesser-known works – many never exhibited outside of Mexico – that are both artifacts from a pivotal moment in the Mexico City art world and key markers in the cultural history of the city."
5. Cri de coeur by Malkia Cyril about the need for "a new civil rights act for the era of big data."
"When all or part of a society is surveilled, outside of the scope of a specific investigation and with neither transparency nor legal parameters, without protections of any kind, that is mass surveillance. Spying on Black people who live in Bed-Stuy because we are Black and live in Bed-Stuy, Muslim communities in New York is mass surveillance. Spying on entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles because gangs exist there, is mass surveillance. Spying on migrants in New Mexico or Arizona or Louisiana is mass surveillance. Spying on low-wage workers at McDonalds and Wal-Mart, is mass surveillance. The time for distinction between the systems that watch you and those that watch me has long passed. Today mass incarceration and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Mass deportation and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Economic inequality and mass surveillance walk hand in hand. Yet, the movements built to solve these problems do not. They remain fractured."
On Fusion: The age of profile anxiety... Kashmir Hill synthesizes recent news about Chinese credit scores and the human-rating app, Peeple, with reference to Who’s Who Among American High School Students.
1. theintercept.com 2. heritagedaily.com | @lauriestories 3. nature.com 4. moore.edu 5. centerformediajustice.org
Bring Together Iconic and Lesser-Known Works