The Offline Report

Jony Ive misses Steve Jobs , ten years after his passing: As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he [Jobs] recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. ... ... I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision. But of course not. Ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I first discovered the author of the beguiling polemic "Surveillance Capitalism" on BookTV's After Words program . The Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Shoshanna Zubofin the early days of her book's availability. She was hypnotically compelling, but with time I snapped out of it and categorized her book as a polemic. However I did notice the extroverts in my life who don't care for "privacy" are quite taken with Zuboff's framing, which is very much for privacy. She gets through to some. Friday Zuboff published an update to her stance, articulate as ever, each sentence building on the next. Here she uncovers the tragedy of the uncommons : The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves ...

Current Affairs interviewed a local S.F. city supervisor who voted against new housing construction on a heavily-used Nordstrom parking lot: ROBINSON Is that because it would just take such a colossal amount of new housing because a lot of what would be built is just going to be bought up and held as investment property? You know, it’s funny. I live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which is similar to parts of San Francisco in that it’s a quaint historic district, and I look out my window at night and see no lights in the other windows because so many of the properties are so valuable that they are just held by people as assets. If you built 10% more of them, it would just be 10% more that were being held as assets without ever actually being lived in by the people of New Orleans. Housing is a climate issue. ------------------------------------- Further Reading: "Homeowners, already more than 40 times as wealthy as renters, were more likely to keep their jobs, profit f...

Nov. 30 "Residents told CBS News that Boise's housing market has changed the city. Young people squeezed out of buying their first home are moving away, along with older residents who are cashing out."    cbs.com "For years, Mendocino Railway and Fort Bragg have battled over land rights, with fights growing increasingly nasty over time. Last year, Mendocino Railway cut down trees on lands owned by residents and had to apologize to the land owners."    sfgate.com   🐤 Even on U.S. Campuses, China Cracks Down on Students Who Speak Out | Students and scholars from China who criticize the regime in Beijing can face quick retaliation from fellow students and Chinese officials who harass their families back home. U.S. universities rarely intervene:     propublica.org   📧 Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight:     propublica.org   📧 Nov. ...