In today's edition: vocaloids, the end of parking, a flag of no nation, Oakland's tech, deep Silicon Valley history, and Powerpoint. 

We already co-create celebrities through fan fiction, fantasy, and memes. And maybe the human at the center of that media universe isn't actually necessary. (Do we need Kim for Kimoji to make sense?) Enter the vocaloids, pop stars made of software that are actually ridiculously popular. Check them out—and the communities that exist around them—in the third segment of Real Future TV.

1. Self-driving vehicles and the end of parking.

"If you drive out to visit Disney's Epcot center in Orlando, Florida, you will arrive at one of the biggest parking lots in America. With room for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out over 7 million square feet—about the size of 122 football fields. If you look at the lot on Google Maps, you realize that it's nearly the size of Epcot center itself. Disney built one Epcot to hold the visitors. Then it built another to hold the cars. Disney isn't alone in its expansive approach to parking. Parking is, after all, what cars do most of the time: The average automobile spends 95 percent of its time sitting in place."

2. This is a brilliant little constellation.

"This is the moment at which our ideas of technology as a series of waymarks on the universal march of human progress falter and fall apart. A single technology – the vacuum-deposition of metal vapour onto a thin film substrate – makes its consecutive and multiple appearances at times of stress and trial: at the dawn of the space age, in orbit and on other planets, at the scene of athletic feats of endurance, in defence and offence in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, on the beaches of the European archipelago. These are moments of hope as well as failure; moments when, properly utilised, technological progress enables us to achieve something which was beyond our capabilities before. And yet: we are still pulling bodies from the water wrapped in material which was meant to send us into space."

3. Oakland trying to find a different path for the tech industry.

"Entrepreneurs and community activists here are working to turn Oakland into a national model for re-engineering the tech industry to better reflect the demographics of the country. Next month, this coalition led by Qeyno Labs and Rainbow PUSH will hold 'Tech EQuity Week,' a first-of-its-kind event for Oakland featuring a 'hacking housing' forum, a hackathon for young people, a start-up pitch session for local entrepreneurs and a career day for aspiring tech workers. With the event, Oakland is sending a message that this working-class city, with its deep cultural roots in social justice, music and the arts, is not your typical tech community — and it has every intention of staying that way."

4. Silicon Valley's oral history has been passed down for generations now.

"When I get to Taylor’s home on a hill overlooking the Valley, he tells me about another visitor who recently took that drive, apparently driven by the same curiosity that Steve Jobs had: Mark Zuckerberg, along with some colleagues at the company he founded, Facebook. 'Zuckerberg must have heard about me in some historical sense,' Taylor recalls in his Texas drawl. 'He wanted to see what I was all about, I guess.' To invent the future, you must understand the past."

5. Powerpoint, rightful subject of scholarly inquiry.

"PowerPoint provides a common infrastructure, a template for the organization of speech, and for the logic of argumentation. As such, it shapes and produces the world. Nevertheless, the application has been almost entirely unremarked upon by critical scholars of media, technology, and the digital humanities. Why? Despite extraordinary claims about the total domination of algorithms, protocols, the digital, bits, and information, the material conditions of mundane software use go largely under-recognized as key sites for cultural work. Where, for example are the books about tax software, bug databases, or personal calendaring applications?"

1. motherjones.com 2. booktwo.org 3. usatoday.com 4. medium.com 5. computationalculture.net | @justinpickard

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The Material Conditions of Mundane Software Use