atlas(t)

offensive place names with Hasan Minhaj

cascade of geolocation fuckups

The default location for Pretoria, South Africa: someone's backyard.

 

yes, this blog is mostly dead, but my friend Thy Tran sent me this article from Gizmodo about a global geolocation fuckup that's, in its own small way, quite spectacular. And I had to put it on here.

At the private home in South Africa of a human rights lawyer and his nurse mother:

The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads.

See, it seems that those "find my phone" applications -- and many, many other geolocation apps -- are fed data by a company called Maxmind, which draws its geolocation data from a U.S. federal government agency, the NGA. Much of this data is mapped to IP (internet provider) addresses; and when an IP can't be mapped to a specific address, it's mapped generally to a city.

But instead of providing an entire city on the map, the NGA, and then Maxmind, choose a central location in that city and make that the default address for the entire city. They, of course, provide what's called an "accuracy radius" (of 5 miles or 100 miles or what have you,) but the apps they feed the data to aren't required to also provide this data (except in their fine print, away from search results.)

So when someone goes looking for a stolen laptop that ended up somewhere in Pretoria, South Africa, they will be directed straight to the house of the human rights lawyer and his nurse mother, which is the default location for all of Pretoria.

There's, apparently, also a house in Kansas which is the default location for all of the United States. And there are many others.

This is the perfect story for our times. Especially the part where the South African lawyer and his mother were being sued by an online store that had fallen so woefully behind on their orders that they were being accused of fraud and cyberbullied. Naturally, they traced the location of their cyberbullies to ... well, you know where.

So a cascade of failures on one side (from the NGA to Maxmind through whatever series of lazily organized apps) and on the other (from the online store's poor management through its customers' unacceptable online behavior) all landed on the doorstep of some good folks who had nothing to do with anything.

No one was deliberately creating FAKE NEWS, but multiple layers of falsehood were created all the same, through laziness, through irresponsibility, through greed (that of the app middlemen, trying to make a buck without providing thorough information,) through the willingness of multiple layers of people to jump to conclusions and go from zero to nuclear in five seconds ...

You don't need bad faith, deceit, or corruption in this world. The internet provides the ability for your smallest mistakes to go viral, and no one is holding anyone accountable for those.

 

decolonized area rapid transit

the amazing poet, graphic designer, and cultural worker Kenji Liu (who is on the board of Kearny Street Workshop, where I work) just decolonized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with this map above, which he created by committee on Facebook. Click here to see the discussions (in comments) on version one, and here for version two.

Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

More thinking needed on this.

But in any case, Kenji is still refining his map, so go visit the Facebook posting and contribute ideas!

edward glaeser on the daily show

edward Glaeser loves him some city. Check it out.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: kim stanley robinson

and finally ...

Intro Kim Stanley Robinson
one of most eminent sf writers: Mars trilogy; Science and Capital trilogy; Galileo's Dreams. Changes his genres all the time.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Quick history of geoengineering and terraforming as words. Begin with science fiction. not unusual. Many modern sciences being as notions in fiction. Sf since Shelley has represented the thought as fact. Among the best entertainment that we have and also one of our best tools for understanding the future. ppl who don't read sf are often spectacularly behind the curve on what ppl have been thinking about the future. immense vertical reach from sublime to ridiculous.

Begins with Verne, Invasion of the Sea. Explains the premise. Basic dichotomy in sf: Verne and Wells. Verne is technical guy, Wells is a utopian writer, better society. Many "goods" of 20th cent. were accomplished by people steeped in Wells' ideas. His ideas came out of Bellamy, the Fabians, the utopian tradition, not original. Trying to put Vernian technological innovations into the social moment.

Jack Williamson 1938 invented word "terraforming." 50 year career. Just a notion until Sagan and Viking results from Mars. Detailed discussions of terraforming came when we got a great candidate for it in Mars. They had Mars, Venus, adn Earth for comparative planetology.

Terraforming: taking a dead planet and making it livable for human beings. Joke that they're terraforming Earth is bitter. The hubris of geoengineering is that it's being overemphasized by analogies to a bomb, etc. This has gone wrong in the past. It's being suggested in a way of creating homeostasis. James Hansen diagram of CO² levels. Scary image. Where the impetus for geoengineering comes from. Also 2002 Greenland ice core. Quick climate change, warm wet climate to cold dry climate in 3 years. "Abrupt Climate Change." Tipping points. Human industrial processes could be inserted at a point to be tipping point.

Go to Sept 2009 paper from Royal Society, graph of proposed methods of CO² reduction and solar radiation managment, you can download for free brings you right up to speed.

Couple of odd features as complications: Global dimming. Aerosols (black carbon) in atmosphere causing 4% less sunlight. Can't fully be explained. As air gets cleaner, global dimming is less. Things we can do to create goods that cut across other things. Unintentional? Cross cuts of effects.

Ocean acidification. Solar management doesn't reduce CO². A lot of it ends up in oceans. Acidification has been measured, we've done something significant to it. Creatures at bottom of food chain have carbonate shells, could go extinct. That layer could be filled by other creatures that can handle the carbon. But this needs to be studied. We get a third of our food from oceans. If bottom of food pyramid disappears, we're screwed. If this happens, there will be hoarding, which will cause our food supply chain to collapse. You can't deacidify oceans. Chalk cliffs of England couldn't do it, not enough. Royal society has said that there's no geoengineering method that will fix this. We HAVE to do carbon emissions reduction.

Problems with geoengineering:

• Moral hazard: if we know we have a solution, we won't reduce. Well actually, that's not the usual response. If they're really thinking about doing this, then we're really in trouble.
• Hubris: humans shouldn't be trying to do something to Mother Earth. It's okay for us to trash Earth but we can't fix it. Intellectual incoherence in this argument. Comes from Frankenstein and Dr. Faustus. The laws of untintended consequences (not actually a law. A fancy way of saying "shit happens.") Murphy's law in action. like a lot of common sense, only good at certain scales.
• Elitism: don't want elites making decisions. Fear of arrogant elites wrecking commons. Fear of government. Reign of Thatcher moment, gov't as problem and not solution. Bitching about government is a way of stabbing ourselves in the back. Keynesian economy, forces are seen as in opposition. Zero-sum game. Two forms of human organization that resemble each other. Biz is residual feudalism, Gov't is remnant of power system. Geoengineering falls into a political battle attacked for what it represents not what it does. Gov and Biz as Manichean opposites.

Royal Society definition of geo engineering: A deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system to address global warming.

Anything we do affects climate. Population is a climate control issue. Population stabilization is a powerful geoengineering method. Then you've pulled the string on the fabric of culture. China's one-child policy is a geo-engineering method. Thailand and Indonesia massively expanded rights of women. Justice is geoengineering. Stretching the definition? Need to look at methods that are immediately applicable. Pull a more humanist approach into geoengineering, about improving people's lives.

Landscape: methods of land use less carbon intensive. Green revolution food productivity. Decarbonize agriculture and increase health of topsoil. Return of wetlands. Assisted migration: moving plants into a new zone before they go extinct. Discrepancy between rich and poor is bad for environment. Rich consume too much, poor are cutting down forests. Richest and poorest are having the hardest impact on environment. Reducing this discrepancy is geoengineering.

Economics is geoengineering. Our economics are not properly calibrated to long term survival on the planet. two ways to talk about it:
False pricing. We have never charged ourselves properly. Everything costs a lot less than it should because we have shifted off costs to future generations. Charge less for something than it costs to make it = predatory dumping. Who are we predating on? Generations of the future. Can't defend themselves. Imagine them as little babies underfeet, imagine us beating them, that's what we're doing. Imagine each generation as equal to us in economic value. We've systemically undervalued future generations. Geoengineering: properly pricing things. Post-capitalism.

A portion of this population will call that a tax. Immediately thrown back into framework of our economy. Political opposition, intense avoidance of economical environmentalism. Pro-carbon party. Will always be controversy. Biz won't like it b/c it's not profitable. Paradigm buster. We claim to have an economy that can put a price on everything. There are religious fundamentalists who won't like it: thinking about Earth as a planet in a secular, scientific world view. Global changes will never be visible to individual senses. With the exception of ice. (My note: that's not true. Increasingly hot summers and warm winters are really easy to perceive.) You have to trust science to believe it. Science is often attacked as a stand-in for government, as atheist thing. Culture of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Discrepancies and incoherences involved. Should be much more effort made to show that sciences are conciliate, you can't cherry-pick. It will always be resisted and controversial b/c it requires a trust of science.

How bad does it have to get before we can pull ourselves together to do it? Food crisis? Polar ice cap pulling away and Washington D.C. flooding. Desperate people do desperate things? What is desperate? Is insurance desperate? Is CPR desperate? Is geoengineering desperate? The CPR moment is desperate, but the action is meticulous and calm. The response is not desperate, but the situation is.

Sokoloff diagrams show that we have to try everything that's ever been put on the table. Is it okay to bring it up? You bring up science as a paradigm. Government as a community. Bring up the idea that we're on a planet, global managers. Climate change is a metonymy for environmental destruction. Imagining climate change fixed is easy, but all the other factors are in play. Let's talk about the total picture and how desperate we are. Santa Cruz cliff houses cantilevered over the ocean, cliff is eroding, beams are eroding. We're adding beams, but we should also have plans for moving the whole house back. There might be one strong beam that will give us one extra generation to solve the whole problem. Is that a silver bullet? Positive: value of discussing geoengineering.

Interview by Colin Milburn (??)

C: proposes theme: can literature be a technology of geoengineering? Social functionality of literature in the world. Goes off on a very nerdy explanation of golden age of sf. Talk about your history with sf, discovery of, and sense of self within.
K: grew up in Orange County. Started out as orchards, which got torn out at a rate of 5 acres a day during his childhood. Had a future shock moment. Systematic child reader, alphabetically. Got to Verne in high school. Were just being translated. Went to sf and went alphabetically, started with Asimov. Tokenized him. Found another sf writer that was great and thought it must all be great. At that point was an English major at UCSD. Early 70s new wave was saying future would be complex and screwed up and there would be no simple engineering solutions. Golden age sf is poor at modeling real science. A lot of people are recommended this stuff and never come back. Scientists don't read sf anymore, or any fiction, cut themselves off. But also humanists who don't know any science. (Risk assessment or exponential scale, for example.) Sf is the bridge between two cultures.

C: What writers were you reading that were addressing these issues?
K: 70s environmentalism began to intrude. Werner Stand on Zanzibar. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Delany, Gene Wolfe. Anything between 1965 and 1975. Moment when genre and culture collide. There have also been times since then that sf is the best way to describe the culture that we live in. Started in the 50s with Philip K. Dick and Damon Knight. JG Ballard's inner landscape is expressed in environmental disasters. The world falling apart is a story that needs to be told over and over.

C: C.P. Snow are we still in this situation of two cultures that can't talk to each other?
K: Still problematic, sees misunderstandings all the time. Unnatural divide between progressives who have an anti-science bias. Science is praxis in a Marxist sense. Designed to create power over illness, reduction in suffering, more comfort in the world at large. "Medicine still at the heart of it. Science is a utopian politics that is poorly theorized by scientists themselves and by the humanists who live with them." Scientists are being blamed for everything. Scientists have a gun to their heads, and the guy with the gun is an economic system that is a remnant of feudalism. Warped utopian effort, warped by money power, military etc. Nailing his flag to the idea of science as an ... etc.

C: Missed it
K: Scientists want science to be clean and pure and not part of the grubby world around it. Hostility on both sides.

C. You never shy away from making bold arguments from humanities. Is there an unfamiliarity of the tools that you use?
K: No nature of the claims. Blah blah blah about Royal Society. Need to add humanist education into science, and would offer intellectual tools etc. I'm checked out, a bit exhausted now. He's talking about the math of ecology. Soft sciences wanting to be able to quantify everything.

The conversation turns to specifics about specific books. Losing me here. Of course, I'm just tired, too, after five solid hours of live-blogging. My shoulders are insanely tight and so are my hands.

Check back in when he starts talking about the Antarctic Artists and Writers program.

sources of white stress

just another quick drop-in here: the somewhat controversial Village Voice article "White America Has Lost Its Mind" (quick aside: love that the title is declarative rather than interrogative, as most such articles are) had the above map of the fearful white mind included. Kinda fun.

mapping stereotypes

via Woffy, this hilarious collection of maps showing how Europe looks to various Europeens. Not a new idea, but still a funny one. Fortunately, this all doesn't really require commentary, but you might be interested to know that this is all the work of one UK-based designer.

Below is the map of how Europe looks to the U.S. Enjoy!

parag khanna world map

Just sticking my head above the parapet long enough to post this cool cool vid from TED of Indian American geopolitics dewd Parag Khanna talking about borders and the world map. Yay!

map animation vi

okay, our YouTube map animations have to take a turn for the interesting and meaningful or I'm gonna lose my shit (read: interest.)

This one above is part of a talk by some Canadian dude about who knows what. The data presented here are interesting, though. The first part is simply oil production between 1965 and 2005. The second one is oil production AND consumption. And if you look at the US, those Gil-Scott Heron lyrics (from 1984) start running through my head.

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune...the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We used to be a producer – very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World. They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now.

Yes indeedy, it has. We should be seeing animated maps like this on the nightly news. The government should be reporting our resource usage to us like a department at a staff meeting: "Today's metrics are ..."

michelle obama relationship map

i don't know why I didn't post this back in February when I found it. Probably had some grand plans for commentary which collapsed in the face of actual paying work. I have, of course, also lost track of the source of this link.

The site it's on is Muckety.com, a place to go to look up just such networks and relationships of power. You can find maps there for Chelsea Clinton, George Clinton, and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

The Kevin Bacon one isn't very satisfying. Despite what everyone says, it seems there's not a lot of power in movies.