Category: Society

The Anti-Information Age

Myself, I sometimes think that I’d gladly censor what’s coming out from the tubes — what you get access to can be so depressing and conflicting with our own beliefs.

No place shows the contradictions of this contest on as grand a scale as China does. The country with the most Internet users and the fastest-growing connected population is also the world’s most ambitious censor. Of the 3 billion Internet users on the planet, 20 percent live in China (10 percent live in the U.S.). The government maintains the “Great Firewall” to block unacceptable content, including foreign news sites. An estimated 2 million censors police the Internet and the activities of users. Yet a 2014 BBC poll found that 76 percent of Chinese reported feeling free from government surveillance. This was the highest rate of the 17 countries surveyed.

→ The Atlantic

The Epidemic of Facelessness

The Gyges effect :

When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate.

→ The New York Times

I’m a Cop. If You Don’t Want to Get Hurt, Don’t Challenge Me.

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

→ The Washington Post

The True Cost of a Burger

Last year, burger chains grossed about $70 billion in sales. So it’s not a stretch to say that the external costs of burgers may be as high as, or even outweigh, the “benefits” (if indeed there are any other than profits). If those externalities were borne by their producers rather than by consumers and society at large, the industry would be a highly unprofitable, even silly one. It would either cease to exist or be forced to raise its prices significantly.

→ The New York Times