Tag Archives: twenteens

the best scholarly books of the decade

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This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

a “decade of liberal failure”?

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According to Alex Pareene at The New Republic, the 2010s were a “decade of liberal failure”. He cites the escalation of the Afghanistan war, so carefully considered by Nobel prize-winning Obama, devolving into an quagmire with no obvious point and no obvious way out. He believes that the stimulus package and Affordable Care Act basically worked, but the Obama administration purposely designed them to work behind the scenes. They actually benefited people, but people don’t give the administration any credit for those benefits, and Republicans are able to successfully play on this misconception.

Philadelphia in the twenteens

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Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

  • young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
  • Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
  • People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.

2010s: order of magnitude increase in renewable energy cost-effectiveness

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This article in Project Syndicate presents the numbers on renewable energy cost-effectiveness for the decade.

The costs of solar and wind power have fallen more than 80% and 70%, respectively, while lithium-ion battery costs are down from $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to $160 per kWh today. These and other breakthroughs guarantee that energy systems which are as much as 85% dependent on variable renewables could produce zero-carbon electricity at costs that are fully competitive with those of fossil-fuel-based systems.

Project Syndicate

the decade in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare

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Wired goes over the major data breaches and cyber attacks of the decade. Huge amounts of data were stolen from both corporations and government agencies, but what really surprised me was the amount of actual cyber warfare between nation states.

  • Stuxnet – attack by U.S. and Israeli governments against Iran in 2010. One thing I didn’t know is this targeted industrial control software made by Siemens. So major industries are controlled by computers, and hacking can increasingly have real-world consequences.
  • Shamoon (2012) – attack by Iran against Saudi Aramco, “inspired” and possibly retaliation for the Stuxnet attack.
  • Sony (2014) – attack by North Korea against Sony in response to a movie depicting the assassination of a North Korean leader
  • Office of Personnel Management (2013-2014) – attack by Chinese government on the U.S. government. This was a massive information theft but was not intended to shut anything down.
  • Russia vs. Ukraine (2015-2016) – several attacks leading to blackouts and confusion coordinated with an actual military attack.
  • Shadow Brokers (2016-2017) – NSA malware stolen and released into the wild, probably by North Korean hackers. The most well-known one was ransomware “Wannacry” which disrupted major corporations including hospitals.
  • And of course, Russian propaganda and disinformation during the 2016 U.S. election.
  • NotPetya (2017) – this was Russian malware targeted at Ukraine, but so bad it affected computers around the world and blew back to affect Russia itself

urban technologies of the twenteens

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Curbed has a list of 10 technologies that affected cities over the last decade: Uber, bike and scooter sharing apps, Airbnb, Instagram, Amazon, WeWork, Waze, Grubhub, and Pokemon Go. I’ve used 5 out of 10, 6 out of 10 if you count the bike sharing app I have used that is a little different than the one they cover. The tone of the article is negative, but if I think back, these technologies have improved my life on balance. I moved close to my job in a walkable city in 2004. At the time, I had one smallish grocery store to choose from (which was great, because many neighborhoods had none). I could rely on taxis around the central city and to and from the airport, but visiting friends outside the city was a problem. I biked for recreation, but didn’t ride to work because I was afraid my bike would be stolen. (I was also afraid of safety – I might nominate improved adoption of bike lanes in U.S. cities as an important urban technology of the last 10 years. Although it’s certainly not new technology, the U.S. has been very slow to adopt and there has been a lot more progress in the last decade than before. There is certainly a long way to go.) I don’t know if I would have managed to stay car-free with two children if it weren’t for ride share, grocery and takeout delivery. These have made a big difference both because of the transportation issue and the tremendous time savings these apps can offer working parents. I tried Instagram once for a project where I was going to document 100 buses running 100 red lights, but a Russian hacker took over my site within days. I am curious about WeWork. I understand their business model hasn’t worked out, but the idea of flexible work spaces as work becomes less tied to physical location (I would nominate Skype and other video and screen sharing apps as critical technology too) appeals to me. I could even see similar concepts working for students and even retirees wanting to get out of the house and pursue various projects for a few hours.