There’s been a lot of outrage on social media in recent days about Apple’s decision to scan photos on people’s phones for hash collisions with material that has been reported to them to be CSAM (but as we’re likely talking hash lists originating with states, who knows – as I’ve seen asked online, “How long before the Tank Man photo appears on this list?"). This isn’t a bad blog post on the matter. Aral does also make the point that we can’t really blame consumers for being stuck between a rock and a hard place – it’s increasingly expected these days that everyone has a smartphone (for purposes like 2FA, mobile banking, Covid-19 check-ins…) and nothing outside the duopoly of Apple and Google is supported well enough to serve these purposes. People shouldn’t be expected to choose between privacy violations and living a reasonably normal, modern life… and yet…

With the Olympics now over, it seems a good time to reflect on what’s happened to the enormously expensive venues that recent host cities have built. Not surprising, really, that hardly anywhere is interested in hosting the Olympic Games any more. There can be some benefits (like the Brisbane 2032 bid apparently was motivated in part by local mayors wanting better train services, and this article says Athens got greatly improved transport infrastructure too) but how overshadowed is it by the cost of unnecessarily large venues and flattering IOC officials’ egos…

The article does also suggest that greater use could be made of pop-up venues (like Pyeongchang’s $101 million disposable stadium – which despite that price tag was less than 15% what Sydney’s Olympic Stadium cost) or else that that the Games could get a permanent home, or maybe that different Olympic sports could have different permanent home cities, although at that point you’d have to wonder what would distinguish the Olympics from existing world championships.

WTAF. An Afghan refugee, who is a permanent resident here in Australia, was asked to get an ID document from Afghanistan as part of his citizenship application. He did as they asked and now the Aus government is claiming he forged it, since Afghan ID documents aren’t exactly high-quality, and he faces loss of his PR status and potentially deportation 😡

Pretty good, short piece on why we should move to extract minerals from recycled goods instead of mining. Sort of insane that it doesn’t already happen tbh…

TBH this headline really understates it. If you read the article (or if you already know the story) it’s painfully obvious that she did not. Arghhhh the US 😤

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Australian citizens abroad are denied the right to return home because of caps on quarantine places and airlines price-gouging and not respecting people’s confirmed bookings, but now, Australia wants to make the right to leave conditional, as well.

This “Fortress Australia” approach might be popular, but is such a hardship on Australians with international connections… and we are, after all, a country where half the population was either born overseas or has at least one parent who was. I think quarantine is a necessity, and we can look abroad to see what we’ve been spared thanks to it, but the system we have is so obviously a kludge and combine that with airlines prioritising wealthy celebrity passengers, many of whom aren’t even Australian, ahead of ordinary dual nationals or expats who just want to see their families…

As children, we were led to imagine that the primarily European Jews fighting in the 1948 war had battled faceless villains intent on barring them from settling in a rightful homeland, a justified inheritance in the wake of genocide. Like so many before them, these enemies were intent on destroying the Jews yet again. Never once did we imagine that perhaps the people they fought were our cousins and siblings from long ago, whose homes and villages were being stolen beneath their feet. Never once did we fathom that Palestinian Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side for hundreds of years in peace as a community. Because Zionism centers European Jews over others, even Arab Jews were left out of the narratives taught to us.

I grieve that, as children, we didn’t have a choice. The adults we loved and trusted imbued us with a sense of Zionist pride, a commitment to the unquestioned defense of this nation-state, and an ingrained colonial entitlement that this land was, in fact, exclusively ours. But how can anybody create a home on top of others’ remains? On top of stolen lives, communities, and memories?

Pretty sure this is the cutest story I’ve seen emerge from the Olympics 🥰 I’d also like to note this post from Tom Daley’s knitting Instagram account, where you can see various puppers showing off his finished creations. A+

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure. If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades. At some point, one of those transactions will be acutely unsatisfying. Those instances, instead of being minor and routine inconveniences, destabilize something inside people, Strasser told me. Although Americans at pretty much every income level have now been socialized into this behavior by the pervasiveness of consumer life, its breakdown can be a reminder of the psychological trap of middle-classness, the one that service-worker deference to consumers allows people to forget temporarily: You know, deep down, that you’re not as rich or as powerful as you’ve been made to feel by the people who want something from you. Your station in life is much more similar to that of the cashier or the receptionist than to the person who signs their paychecks.

Interesting piece, and also includes a section on the historical origins of the “service worker” (as in, when department stores came about). I would argue, of course, that this “middle-class class consciousness” is illusory, as most of these office workers are as dependent on selling their labour to fund their existence as anyone else. The differences in consciousness can be real, though.

Ignoring class divisions in Black America over the last 40 years has allowed the benefits of racial progress to be concentrated upon the Black middle- and upper- classes while the Black poor have largely been excluded. Popular culture embodies the problem in the same way higher education does, which is a problem because inequity is always a problem. However, the centrality of popular culture to America’s understanding of Black people, and the fact that popular culture contains within itself all the best platforms for sharing stories about ourselves, imbues the situation with a particularly bleak and sinister air.