You Wouldn't Download a Car

The sound of a thousand digital twin insurance companies being born (to protect your real assets from digital vandalism, of course).

Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon

May 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/pokemon-go-players-are-altering-public-map-data-to-catch-rare-pokemon/

This isn't graffiti, but it's like graffiti; defacing public property, or property that's not yours ... Is map data public or private property? The underlying data is sometimes public, or other people's private, but not the company that makes the map. Anyway, graffiti is a form of rebellion against a system that takes things away from you, only to give it back to "everyone", and where "everyone" is really just the people left over who can afford to own things. Who owns the data? 

Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal

May 2025, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/stack-overflow-users-sabotage-their-posts-after-openai-deal/

The words "user hostile" have become rampant on the big wordbox we call the internet. In this case, a website that runs a chat forum about computers decided that the millions of hours worth of users putting really complex computer problems into machine-readable text for other users would be really valuable if we instead gave it to one single company who owns a really big reading machine. The users who did all the work here (value = work) decided nah, let's corrupt the data by changing our posts. Not just deleting their posts, but changing the right answers to completely nonsensical answers so wrong they're dangerous. And that is the future of the internet.

Image credit: AI Art - Holding Hands 5 - 2023

Off the Grid

Brooklyn's social housing microgrid rewrites relationships with utility companies
Aug 2017, The Guardian

"Microgrids offer something that rooftop solar alone cannot: the ability to leave the grid entirely."

Until the shit goes down.

I am totally into the sentiment here, and I hope this triggers copycats all across the city, and every city. But there is no such thing as an island in the middle of a city; unless of course you're an actual island. After the power went out during Superstorm Sandy, there was not a single hot (powered) outlet in the city that didn't have something plugged into it. There is no way that a community like this, with its off-the-grid resilience, would be spared during an emergency of like proportions. They would be inundated by others trying to charge their phones, and their phone chargers, and their phone charger chargers.

If you want to be able to maintain power in such an emergency where everyone around you does not have it, you're gonna need a lil military to go with that power grid. A security defense system that keeps people out, and maybe even a way to protect the people who live there as they go out into the rest of the city, because people will be pretty pissed that you get power and they don't. This is all part of the glaring hole in prepper mentality - you may be able to prepare for you and your family, but you can't prepare for others. When the shit really goes down, the most dangerous thing you will face is not food shortages but other people.