McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 29th 2020

• The Sweetgreen-ification of Society. "We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where." This is one of the things I miss from Turin. There was more diversity of age groups and social classes living in the city centre (where I did), and good food at all levels of fanciness of restaurant and trattorie.
• Research In The Wild. An important challenge for our times, and part of why I want more people to understand the realities of tech, and more of them to be in all roles across society. "Suppose Cambridge is going to have regulations about what science of DNA-level technology can be done. Who’s going to make the decisions? You’re not going to let the scientists make the decisions, even though they said, “You can trust us, after all we’re.. .” So you say okay, well, we have to let the public make the decision. So we have to form an outside group. Who are you going to put on the committee? Are you going to walk down to the central square and point at people at random and say, “You’re on the committee”? You can’t do that because people have to be highly educated in this material before they can make decisions. So therefore you take academics or biologists, but they already have a vested interest. And this is a long-standing legal problem in the United States or anywhere. When you want to have a regulation of something, who do you make the regulators? You have to make the regulators people who understand the technology. Who are the people who understand che technology? People who already have a vested interest in it."
• David Olusoga talk at The Bluecoat. Recorded two years ago, an excellent jaunt through how global so many of the "quintessentially British" things we hold dear really are, and how much we omit from our history. He makes an interesting point during the Q&A that history is somewhere that the British go for comfort. I think there's a lot of truth in that.