Japan 2016.

“I don’t think people have said what they want to do with the space. Is this just for the hell of it? So people can wander?” said Joseph Martin, who teaches civil engineering at Drexel University. “Someone is using that road to go from somewhere to somewhere. So how do the needs of advocates that want to play dog Frisbee in front of their house exceed the people in their cars and their needs? That’s pretty arrogant.”

[…]

Resistance could also come from city drivers and commuters. To Drexel’s Martin, a self-described city boy who drives to work from his home in Havertown , a no-car day also takes the soul out of what makes an urban metropolis just that. “The hustle and bustle of the city,” he said, “it’s part of the excitement.

“City boy.” Yeah. Okay. 

(via The drive for carless streets in Philadelphia)

San Francisco, looking for breakfast.

The conversations about equality are so localized, and you want to be a good person but have an iPhone, too, and you just end up in this situation where you wake up a hypocrite and you go to bed a hypocrite and you overtip your cabbie just to feel human for a moment. This is being a parent, to me.

—The Internet of Parents Is Miserable & I Love It – The Cut

I just spent two days in San Francisco participating in a vendor¹’s “Customer Advisory Board” and conference. My previous trip to Silicon Valley felt like a Turkish bazaar: crowded, bustling, beautiful, frustrating and above all, mercenary². This visit felt like Rome just before the fall – or more generously, Marie Antionette’s France: decadent beyond any reasonable aesthetic or commercial justification. Leather, oil-rubbed wood, speakeasy in the library, alcohol everywhere, amazing food, dressed for the court, and conspicuously non-mercenary. Constant talk of changing the world and fostering happiness and love, and never stooping to compete or haggle or weigh costs and benefits. And all built amidst the old warehouses and factories of the industries that died decades ago.

It was a great two days: my hosts were wonderful and gracious and EXTREMELY generous. They seemed genuinely interested in talking and hearing feedback and I don’t fear for them technically, but that money and that environment must change people.

1: Oh how they’d hate that word.

2: In the “primarily concerned with making money” sense, not the “professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army” sense.

I can see the future of art and it is a viral photograph stamping on human sensibilities.

Of course, producers in a modern capitalist economy sell us products that we don’t really need. That’s because capitalism has already taken care of our most basic needs. The richer society gets, the harder producers must work to sell. Anyone can sell water in a desert but it takes real ingenuity to sell bottles of water to people who already have plenty to drink for free. Is bottled water stupid? Maybe so but then so is putting satellites into space so that every Rolling Stones song ever made can be played anywhere in the world from the palm of one’s hand. Indeed, just about every good and service in modern society can be critiqued as “unreal,” “unnecessary” or “unneeded”. So what? It’s only rock and roll but I like it.

—A Phool and His Money - New Rambler Review