The Aggregate ✍ December 2nd, 2019
Hello! I am Lars E. Schonander, a writer for MediaFile and a blogger on international affairs, tech, and general wonkery. Happy Monday! Here is my weekly newsletter with a weekly analysis with interesting data, along with links related to things I found particularly interesting that week. Any Questions? Send me a message or just respond to this email!
No data this week, and sorry for last week, I been rather overwhelmed with exams and papers. The full newsletter will return on the 17th when I am not writing 4 seperate papers and stuyding for a final.
In the mean time, I been practicing some GIS programming in R by using the SF and OSMDATA packages, along with a dataset on state-sanctioned violence in Niceragua that I had for awhile at this point.
Turns out ST_JOIN is a very handy function indeed, considering all the joins that were required to create this.
The 17th’s The Aggregate will be devoted to some charts that were only possible to make because of GIS programming.
Now, some links…
L.A. Leere (Homintern): Asking the Wrong Questions
Of course, we all know that paranoia, or the appearance thereof, is incompatible with seriousness within the American political profession. America’s political professionals (politicians, aides, journalists, and so on) are terrified that they might become vulnerable to the charge of paranoia. Tarred with that brush, you find yourself immediately in the company of the laughingstocks and villains of America’s political life. To be paranoid is to be grouped with moon landing denialists, tinfoil-hat wearing fluoride conspiracists, McCarthyesque alarmists, and all the other crackpot marginalia of American politics. To be paranoid is to embody an existential threat to American political culture as one who lacks faith in the rituals that undergird it, while simultaneously falling beneath the threshold of seriousness required to have one’s ideas engaged with as political rather than pathological. In short: once you are accepted as paranoid, you have already lost.
Paul Dourish (Big Data and Society): Algorithms and their others: Algorithmic culture in context
Algorithms, once obscure objects of technical art, have lately been subject to considerable popular and scholarly scrutiny. What does it mean to adopt the algorithm as an object of analytic attention? What is in view, and out of view, when we focus on the algorithm? Using Niklaus Wirth's 1975 formulation that “algorithms + data structures = programs” as a launching-off point, this paper examines how an algorithmic lens shapes the way in which we might inquire into contemporary digital culture.
Dave Teare: A love letter to DHH and others concerned about our recent funding announcement
The overwhelming reaction to our funding announcement last week where we brought Accel onboard as partner and sold them a minority, no-control stake in 1Password has been fantastic.
Many people shared their love on Twitter and reached out to me personally to share their excitement for 1Password and to congratulate us. I even managed to reconnect with some of my IBM friends and colleagues from 20 years ago! ❤️
As with any change there were also concerns and fear that accompanied the news. Fear that we’d lose control, fear about aggressive growth, and fear that our UX would become enterprise-y.
I can totally relate to where people are coming from and I’m thankful that people care enough about 1Password to be worried for us. It means a lot to me and the team knowing we have so many people rooting for us. 🤗
Thankfully we’re gonna be fine. There are a lot of incorrect assumptions that those fears are based on and I’d love to clear them up.
Amber A’Lee Frost (American Affairs): The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class
It was years later that a friend explained to me that Nickel and Dimed was in fact a revelation, just not for socialists. “Well yeah,” she said matter-of-factly, “that book wasn’t for us, it was for professional‑managerial-class liberals.” This wasn’t my first exposure to the phrase “professional managerial class” (PMC), but it was the first time the distinction seemed so sociologically significant as to force me to revise my opinion of Ehrenreich’s work. Is she a progressive liberal whisperer, spreading the gospel of class politics to the PMC? Is such a task even a worthwhile endeavor?
Jake Denton (NPR): Which Arthur Russell Are We Getting On 'Iowa Dream'?
"I'm a wonder boy / I can't do nothing," the late avant-pop artist Arthur Russell laments on "Wonder Boy," amid stop-and-go piano and plonky vibraphone. "The poster was nailed to a tree and somebody tore it down / Bits of paper nailed to a tree — that's all I found." In part because his legacy was never fully in his own control, the image — taken from the first song of a new album — lives on as an inwardly critical fantasy, rather than the self-fulfilling prophecy it nearly became.
What I’m Reading
The writers of Why Nations Fail wrote a new book, in this case it is on liberty. Currently working my way through it but one thing I quite like is the note it makes on the Weimar Republic. One of the flaws if the Weimar Republic was that many members of it such as the conservatives who wanted the Kaisereich back or the KDP who wanted a communist state did not respect the democratic state, and would have gladly ended democracy in Germany to get their goals. The right wing under Von Pappen in Germany actually decided to follow up on this idea, leading to the Nazi’s.
A few people have been noting that this issue has been popping up again, ranging from people thinking that the Chinese are doing nothing wrong to the Ughyers, to a certain type of American leftist who really wants to end democratic norms so their polical hobby-horse can pass.
What I’m Working On
Veyr busy schedule, studying for finals and finishing up some papers.
Thanks!
Thanks for taking the time to read this, I will be back next Monday. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or reach out via email.