Link Salad, the Brave New World Edition
-- The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law - Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker, Jan. 1, 2018
"uliana grew up with a single memory of her father. He was sitting in the half-light of evening on the porch of their home, in a small town in El Salvador, while her mother cooked dinner in the kitchen. A man in a black mask emerged from the darkness. Juliana heard three gunshots, and saw her father fall off his chair, vomiting blood. She was three years old at the time, and afterward she wondered if the killing had actually happened. The most tangible detail was the man in the mask, who came to seem more present in her life than her father ever was. Juliana used to find her mother by the windows, pulling back a corner of the curtains to be sure that he had not returned. “It was like that man went on living with us,” Juliana told me. One day when she was older, her mother said that a gang called the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, had killed her father for refusing to pay a tax on a deli that he operated out of the house."
-- After the liberation of Mosul, an orgy of killing - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2017
"The heritage of torture in Iraq evolved in a linear path from Saddam’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, to the Americans in Abu Ghraib, and thence to the sectarian forces of the Iraqi government and its militias. Now, in the nightmare of Mosul, torture served no investigative purpose. It achieved and demanded nothing beyond an imperative to exact pain and revenge."
-- The Terror-Industrial Complex - Brian Castner, WIRED, Dec. 12, 2017
"In Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters are in retreat, losing ground to government forces and becoming increasingly constrained in their attacks and ambitions. But their intellectual capital-their weapon designs, the engineering challenges they’ve solved, their industrial processes, blueprints, and schematics-still constitute a major threat. “That’s really the scary part, to the extent that the ISIS model proliferates,” says Matt Schroeder, a senior researcher at the Small Arms Survey, the Geneva-based think tank where Spleeters used to contribute. Much of the international structure that prevents weapons trafficking is rendered useless if ISIS can simply upload and share their designs and manufacturing processes with affiliates in Africa and Europe, who also have access to money and machinery."
-- You Are a Number - Mara Hvistendahl, WIRED, Dec. 14, 2017
"In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers, runs deep. How do I know you’re not a pianzi? is a question people often ask when salespeople call on the phone or repairmen show up at the door. While my score likely didn’t put me in the ranks of pianzi, one promise of Zhima Credit was identifying those who were. Companies can buy risk assessments for users that detail whether they have paid their rent or utilities or appear on the court blacklist. For businesses, such products are billed as time-savers. On the site Tencent Video, I stumbled across an ad for Zhima Credit in which a businessman scrutinizes strangers as he rides the subway. “Everybody looks like a pianzi,” he despairs. His employees, trying to guard against shady customers, cover the office conference room walls with photos of lowlifes and criminals. But then-tada!-the boss discovers Zhima Credit, and all of their problems are solved. The staff celebrate by tearing the photos off the wall."
-- Jordan Peele's X-Ray Vision - Wesley Morris, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2017
"As a concept, the sunken place has grown even more capacious. It has been repurposed to explain both institutional disenfranchisement and racial self-estrangement - an explanation for the behavior of black people who seem to be under white control, based on either their sustained proximity to whiteness or statements construable as anti-black, or probably both. Sunken-place entrants include Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, sometimes Kanye West and any black person with something nice to say about President Trump. It’s more generous than “sellout” and less punitive than “Uncle Tom,” a dis and a road to redemption."
-- Game On - Nathan Hill, WIRED, Dec. 5, 2017
"And by “react accordingly” I mean that you not only execute a certain strategy correctly, but you also, if necessary, do so with any number of different heroes. Overwatch involves constant on-the-fly improvisational skill, an almost instinctive reaction to ever-changing conditions inside the game. If you play a really great damage-dealer but the other team is running a comp that neutralizes your particular hero, you must be able to extemporaneously and at any time switch to a different hero with a different specialization that disrupts the other team’s strategy. Plus, each hero has up to four different abilities that they can deploy at various times, including an “ultimate” ability that takes a long time to charge up and, when spent correctly, can be a total game-changer. So that’s about a hundred different abilities from 26 different characters teamed up in one of 230,230 different combinations. It’s mind-boggling. The sheer number of variables in play seems to exceed the human brain’s ability to grasp the scale and scope of big things. Which raises a question: How is it even possible to be good at this? I decided to travel to Redondo Beach, California, to the house where Stefano Disalvo lives with his team, to find out."
"uliana grew up with a single memory of her father. He was sitting in the half-light of evening on the porch of their home, in a small town in El Salvador, while her mother cooked dinner in the kitchen. A man in a black mask emerged from the darkness. Juliana heard three gunshots, and saw her father fall off his chair, vomiting blood. She was three years old at the time, and afterward she wondered if the killing had actually happened. The most tangible detail was the man in the mask, who came to seem more present in her life than her father ever was. Juliana used to find her mother by the windows, pulling back a corner of the curtains to be sure that he had not returned. “It was like that man went on living with us,” Juliana told me. One day when she was older, her mother said that a gang called the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, had killed her father for refusing to pay a tax on a deli that he operated out of the house."
-- After the liberation of Mosul, an orgy of killing - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2017
"The heritage of torture in Iraq evolved in a linear path from Saddam’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, to the Americans in Abu Ghraib, and thence to the sectarian forces of the Iraqi government and its militias. Now, in the nightmare of Mosul, torture served no investigative purpose. It achieved and demanded nothing beyond an imperative to exact pain and revenge."
-- The Terror-Industrial Complex - Brian Castner, WIRED, Dec. 12, 2017
"In Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters are in retreat, losing ground to government forces and becoming increasingly constrained in their attacks and ambitions. But their intellectual capital-their weapon designs, the engineering challenges they’ve solved, their industrial processes, blueprints, and schematics-still constitute a major threat. “That’s really the scary part, to the extent that the ISIS model proliferates,” says Matt Schroeder, a senior researcher at the Small Arms Survey, the Geneva-based think tank where Spleeters used to contribute. Much of the international structure that prevents weapons trafficking is rendered useless if ISIS can simply upload and share their designs and manufacturing processes with affiliates in Africa and Europe, who also have access to money and machinery."
-- You Are a Number - Mara Hvistendahl, WIRED, Dec. 14, 2017
"In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers, runs deep. How do I know you’re not a pianzi? is a question people often ask when salespeople call on the phone or repairmen show up at the door. While my score likely didn’t put me in the ranks of pianzi, one promise of Zhima Credit was identifying those who were. Companies can buy risk assessments for users that detail whether they have paid their rent or utilities or appear on the court blacklist. For businesses, such products are billed as time-savers. On the site Tencent Video, I stumbled across an ad for Zhima Credit in which a businessman scrutinizes strangers as he rides the subway. “Everybody looks like a pianzi,” he despairs. His employees, trying to guard against shady customers, cover the office conference room walls with photos of lowlifes and criminals. But then-tada!-the boss discovers Zhima Credit, and all of their problems are solved. The staff celebrate by tearing the photos off the wall."
-- Jordan Peele's X-Ray Vision - Wesley Morris, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2017
"As a concept, the sunken place has grown even more capacious. It has been repurposed to explain both institutional disenfranchisement and racial self-estrangement - an explanation for the behavior of black people who seem to be under white control, based on either their sustained proximity to whiteness or statements construable as anti-black, or probably both. Sunken-place entrants include Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, sometimes Kanye West and any black person with something nice to say about President Trump. It’s more generous than “sellout” and less punitive than “Uncle Tom,” a dis and a road to redemption."
-- Game On - Nathan Hill, WIRED, Dec. 5, 2017
"And by “react accordingly” I mean that you not only execute a certain strategy correctly, but you also, if necessary, do so with any number of different heroes. Overwatch involves constant on-the-fly improvisational skill, an almost instinctive reaction to ever-changing conditions inside the game. If you play a really great damage-dealer but the other team is running a comp that neutralizes your particular hero, you must be able to extemporaneously and at any time switch to a different hero with a different specialization that disrupts the other team’s strategy. Plus, each hero has up to four different abilities that they can deploy at various times, including an “ultimate” ability that takes a long time to charge up and, when spent correctly, can be a total game-changer. So that’s about a hundred different abilities from 26 different characters teamed up in one of 230,230 different combinations. It’s mind-boggling. The sheer number of variables in play seems to exceed the human brain’s ability to grasp the scale and scope of big things. Which raises a question: How is it even possible to be good at this? I decided to travel to Redondo Beach, California, to the house where Stefano Disalvo lives with his team, to find out."