# data[].attributes.body
A subscription model for a monthly box full of  candies and snacks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TokyoTreat: Japanese Candy & Snacks Subscription Box

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Japanese snack subscription box that delivers monthly Japanese candy from Tokyo to your door with free shipping worldwide. Experience Japanese snacks!

# data[].attributes.body
Radical urban actions expressed through art

# data[].attributes.body
Brief Canva is a useful tool If you have been sick of piling up tons of notes with bullet points taken during the first meetings with the client.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
WHAT IS A BRIEF CANVAS?

We honestly have been sick of piling up tons of notes with bullet points taken during the first meetings with the client. Since clients usually have confused ideas themselves about what they actually want, your return to the office might feel somehow dizzy from all the information.

This is why we have created this precious tool to line up the talked-over clues in one single document. Debriefs have never been the same since, guaranteed!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WHAT IS A BRIEF CANVAS?We honestly have been sick of piling up tons of notes with bullet points taken during the first meetings with the client. Since clients usually have confused ideas themselves about what they actually want, your return to the offic...

# data[].attributes.body
A creative collage made by bored designers who worked from home

# data[].attributes.body
A software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by companies that threaten to accelerate climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Climate Strike Software is software that uses the Climate Strike License, a software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.

1. Top OSS projects that accelerate the climate crisis

2. How to use the License

3. Reading List

4. Is it an Open Source License

Despite the urgency of our planet's climate crisis, oil production is at an all-time high. The use of new technology is one of the main reasons behind the growth. Reservoirs that were deemed too costly to harvest are now being harvested with new equipment, better industrial processes, and increasingly specialized software. At this rate, most oil and gas company's projected oil production is only set to increase.

Most recently, Big Oil has begun to use cloud computing, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate fossil fuel extraction. Specialists have also begun to call AI the next "productivity revolution in the Oil & Gas industry" and are increasingly depending open source technologies to increase their efficiency. In their profit-maximizing short-sightedness, oil and gas companies are ramping up with new software to automate and optimize oil production.

By adopting the Climate Strike License, developers can explicitly prohibit the use of their software within some of the largest oil companies including Chevron, BP, Exxon Mobil, and many other companies that turn a blind eye to the greatest threat that humanity has faced.

This license reminds developers that we have the power to stop these multinational oil companies from taking advantage of open source software -- that instead of waiting idly by, that they can take an active position in preventing a climate catastrophe.

This is a list of the top 10 open source projects that knowingly or unknowingly contributes to the climate crisis. If each of these projects adopt the climate strike license, we may start to see a significant impact to the productivity of the fossil fuel industries.

To create this list, we parsed through GitHub for all the repos that are explicitly used for oil production and we looked through all of their dependencies. This list reflects the repos that are most commonly used when building software for oil production.

See our full methodology for creating this list.

To use the license in your project, follow the steps below:

1. Add the license appropriate for your project ( MIT, BSD, or request another) to the root level of your project:

2. Update the <year> and <copyright holders> fields at the top of the license.

3. Attach the badge to your project by pasting the following snippet into your project's README.md:

[![Build Status](https://img.shields.io/static/v1.svg?label=CSL&message=software%20against%20climate%20change&color=green?style=flat&logo=github)](https://img.shields.io/static/v1.svg?label=CSL&message=software%20against%20climate%20change&color=green?style=flat&logo=github)

4. Add your project to the Greenlist by making a PR to this repo.

A short list of useful articles about software and climate change:

How Google, Microsoft, and Big Tech Are Automating the Climate Crisis
This article provides a good overview of how the three cloud computing giants (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) have become active collaborators of the oil and gas industry and how they are using AI to automate the climate crisis.

Amazon Employees Will Walk Out Over the Company's Climate Change Inaction
Amazon workers walked out on September 20th, 2019 as part of the Global Climate Strike. They demanded the following of their company: (1) Zero emissions by 2030, (2) Zero custom Amazon Web Services (AWS) contracts for fossil fuel companies to accelerate oil and gas extraction, (3) Zero funding for climate denying lobbyists and politicians.

Here are 10 ways AI could help fight climate change
Instead of using AI to accelerate the climate crisis, AI can also be used to fight against it. This article gives us some ideas for how open source technologies and AI can make a positive impact instead of a negative one.

While the Climate Strike License violates the Open Source Initiative's canonical Open Source Definition, which explicitly excludes licenses that limit re-use "in a specific field of endeavor", we feel that as tech workers, we should take responsibility in how our software is used, and that the urgency of climate change cannot be limited by the ideological position of open source software. Instead, we want adopters of the Climate Strike License to take a bold stance in the fight to save the planet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Climate Strike Software is software that uses the Climate Strike License, a software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.

# data[].attributes.body
The global GDP would grow anywhere between 67% and 147% if all global barriers to labor mobility were removed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We have been sheltering in place for three months now. This whole experience has been difficult, but it has also been educational. Surprisingly, despite growing up as a company centralized in a single location, despite years of investing in culture and processes built on that assumption, despite ...

# data[].attributes.body
Fabricating alternatives:

a catalyst for beyond now ideas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Try out these games with your AI card deck. Whether a meeting at work, an intellectual discussion in a bar, during a creative block, game night with family, or on a date, these quick games can add some laughs, musings, and unlikely ideas to your interactions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Try out these games with your AI card deck. Whether a meeting at work, an intellectual discussion in a bar, during a creative block, game night with family, or on a date, these quick games can add some laughs, musings, and unlikely ideas to your interactions.

# data[].attributes.body
Why GitLab hired a ‘head of remote’ before the Corona virus pandemic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why this company hired a "head of remote" before the pandemic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tech startup Gitlab has an all-remote employee base of 1,200, plus an exec dedicated to optimizing work without an office

# data[].attributes.body
A series of best practices for a remote workplace

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The development of open source software has been distributed from the beginning. There are over one hundred million open source projects in the world. On average, more than 74 thousand community contributors make contributions to the world's most popular repositories on GitHub. GitHub was founded on making a developer's job easier with open and asynchronous communication, and it's become the world's most popular platform for developers to collaborate on open source projects from anywhere. The teams at GitHub mirror our community-we collaborate on building GitHub from all corners of the world because it's important that our team is just like our community.

Now, the impact of the COVID-19 virus has shifted our view on working from almost anywhere (largely our homes right now) and virtual collaboration.

As a developer-oriented company that's so largely distributed, all teams within GitHub have learned some of the finer nuances of successful remote collaboration. We recognize this isn't always typical for functions such as human resources, finance, legal, marketing, and sales and that many of you may be working remote for the first time. With this in mind, we're kicking off a new series to share best practices for managing remote business in specific functions.

First up is Kem Boggs, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at GitHub. Kem has helped hire hundreds of Hubbers and created some of our most successful employee programs as we've scaled to become the home for millions of developers.

What do you feel makes the GitHub culture so unique?

We've been progressive in remote working for over a decade, which serves us well given all the changes happening at the moment. We're a highly distributed workforce and focus on making sure that our employee experience doesn't change regardless of location. To accomplish this, our employee benefits programs offer extensive support for remote working to match what an employee in an office would experience. This lets employees work and live almost anywhere in the world.

We also put a lot of focus on collaboration and strong communications. By using tools like GitHub, Slack, and Zoom, everyone can interact and engage across the company. We emphasize how to communicate on these platforms in onboarding so employees aren't lost or confused, and we trade and collect best practices in GitHub repositories. We also record every internal event and share it immediately so people can watch it on their schedule or time zone. During those events, we use chat for live questions, comments, and camaraderie.

Speaking from my own experience as a remote employee, I've never felt lonely at GitHub. This is fascinating to me, since often the biggest downside of working remotely is said to be loneliness. The clear communication channels and processes we have, and a focus on "finding your people" through hobby (woodworking, anyone?) and lifestyle (cat or dog preference?) channels to connect to colleagues with the same interests, keeps our employees constantly engaged, valued, and contributing.

Another element of fostering a remote workforce is making sure that our employees can grow their career regardless of location. You need to be comfortable with everyone-from executives to managers to individual contributors-not being in one location.

Feeling included is a big part of being successful as a distributed workforce, which is why we hold a diversity and inclusion interview with every external hire, at every level-a truly distinctive aspect of our interview process. We have an unbiased person (not on the hiring team) discuss their individual experiences with inclusive environments. There aren't any wrong answers, and it helps to set the expectation for our culture of acceptance and diversity.

Can you explain how and why GitHub created the recruiting and employee programs that we have in place and how they may have changed over time?

Our programs have definitely evolved over time. When I started here four years ago, we were four hundred employees and now we expect to be over two thousand by July 2020. That's a massive change, so naturally a lot of our programs have been reviewed. We try to focus on making sure that they work for all employees, are systematic, and without inherent discrimination. The biggest mistake a company can make is to establish remote working programs based on one location and expect them to work around the world. You need to think holistically by considering policies, practices, and resources in countries outside of the US so employees are supported wherever they're located. Examples include arranging support through coworking spaces, and providing the resources to set up a home office are a few examples to start. This has been key for us and is especially important during our COVID-19 pandemic.

What's your final bit of advice for companies implementing distributed workforce programs for the first time?

Be intentional from day one about making sure that people have a way to feel a sense of belonging and connection to the company and its community, regardless of where they're working. You can also easily showcase your commitment to remote work to employment candidates with virtual interviews. A truly remote-friendly environment gives people the chance to work for their dream company, and your dream employees to work for you, without the barriers of location.

Want to learn more about best practices for working remotely? Check back next week as we continue our series to help you make the most of working in a remote environment from our next interview.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Remote work: A series of best practices for a remote workplace

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The development of open source software has been distributed from the beginning. There are over one hundred million open source projects in the world. On average, more than 74 thousand community contributors make contributions to the world's most popular repositories on GitHub.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Case for Banning Facial Recognition (Published 2020)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Google research scientist explains why she thinks the police shouldn’t use facial recognition software.

# data[].attributes.body
Europeans want to keep their cities car-free

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic appearing to subside, Europe is giving its love to wide bike-friendly boulevards and café terraces instead of car-clogged streets.

New polling data from 21 cities across six European countries shows a clear majority in favor of measures geared at preventing a return to pre-pandemic levels of air pollution. There is strong support for new zero-emissions zones, banning cars from urban areas and maintaining road space gains for bike lanes and pedestrian paths implemented during the health crisis.

According to data provided to POLITICO, 68 percent of 7,545 respondents to a YouGov survey conducted for the NGOs Transport & Environment and the European Public Health Alliance said they wanted to see air pollution reduction policies - including restrictions on car access to city centers - kept in place.

The survey covers major cities in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the Brussels metropolitan area, and was conducted between May 14 and 21.

While 55 percent of Germans agreed that "effective measures to protect citizens from air pollution" should be introduced "even if it means preventing polluting cars from entering the city," in other countries, where lockdown measures were more extreme, between 74 percent and 82 percent of the population supported such policies.

Lockdowns kept people at home and roads empty, leading to a drop in air pollution throughout Europe. However, pollution numbers are rapidly returning to normal as restrictions are lifted.

In order to cater to new mobility habits aimed at ensuring social distancing, policies were put in place that ranged from pop-up bike lanes in Berlin to new speed-limit restrictions in the center of Brussels, and reduced parking slots in places such as Dublin and Vilnius.

The measures have given urban dwellers a look at the kind of city that environmentalists and green city-planners have been demanding for years. The survey shows people like the new look.

"We know which way we have to go; COVID has only given us a push forward," Bart Dhondt, the Brussels municipality's alderman for mobility with the Dutch-speaking Greens party, told POLITICO.

The wider Brussels region's mobility plans include measures to curb car traffic, boost bikes and public transport and redistribute public space.

The coronavirus crisis "will put more pressure on going forward with these policies of creating a city that's good to live in," Dhondt said. "These objectives of clean air, of public space, parks, green areas in your neighborhood are really important to ensure that people ... stay in a city."

Three-quarters of those polled expressed support for "reallocating public space to walking, cycling and public transport."

Politicians are reacting to the change in sentiment. In Berlin, one of the first cities to implement wider bike lanes at the expense of car traffic, officials are clear they want to turn the temporary yellow markings and mobile traffic warning signs that demarcate the routes into permanent bike paths by the end of the year.

Fight for space

"Europeans are demanding more bike lanes, safer public transport and fewer polluting cars," said William Todts, executive director at T&E. "The challenge now is to make these 'temporary' sustainable measures permanent, replace polluting cars with shared, electric vehicles and get other cities to follow suit."

Cleaner cities have health impacts. Air pollution is associated with higher coronavirus fatality rates, while the European Environment Agency estimates smog caused some 400,000 premature deaths in 2016, and there are even concerns about noise pollution from traffic.

"Now the invisible killer is visible: Air pollution made us sick, worsened the pandemic and hit the most deprived the hardest," said Sascha Marschang, acting secretary-general of the European Public Health Alliance.

But there are national differences.

While an average of 64 percent of respondents agreed that they had experienced clean air and said they "don't want to go back to the air pollution levels" from before the pandemic, only 52 percent of German respondents were in favor.

While car-crazy Germany has had its own long-running debates over vehicular pollution, Jens Müller, clean air manager at T&E, said, "The fact that support for new policies is somewhat less strong than in other countries may also be due to the fact that the effects of the pandemic have been better contained there."

In hard-hit Italy and Spain, in contrast, over three-quarters of those surveyed said that zero-emissions zones should be put in place to slash air pollution and keep dirty cars out of cities.

Those results are sure to cause a stir in Madrid, where conservative Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida came to power a year ago promising to do away with the capital's zero-emissions zone, which he claimed harmed business interests. While large protests prevented the mayor from eliminating the zone altogether, last fall he announced plans to ease traffic restrictions in the city center.

But with 82 percent of Spaniards expressing support for these, Martínez-Almeida may now have to rethink the plan.

The data also suggests lukewarm enthusiasm for public transport, something that's more troubling for environmental advocates who have been pushing for decades to get people out of cars and into subways and buses. Some 39 percent of Germans say they will not use public transport "due to the risk of contagion of the coronavirus."

However, just over half of Spaniards say they would return to mass transit if "sufficient hygiene measures are taken to prevent contagion," for example mandatory masks and reduced capacity, an opinion shared by a large number of Italian and Brussels-based respondents.

The survey was conducted in Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Milan, Paris, Marseille, Lille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Greater London, Greater Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow.

This article is part of POLITICO 's premium policy service: Pro Mobility. From the digitization of the automotive sector to aviation policy, logistics and more, our specialized journalists keep you on top of the topics driving the Mobility policy agenda. Email pro@politico.eu for a complimentary trial.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Life after COVID: Europeans want to keep their cities car-free

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic appearing to subside, Europe is giving its love to wide bike-friendly boulevards and café terraces instead of car-clogged streets. New polling data from 21 cities across six European countries shows a clear majority in favor of measures geared at preventing a return to pre-pandemic levels of air pollution.

# data[].attributes.body
Unfinished building as an architectural style

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Possiamo parlare di incompiuto milanese?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Il collettivo artistico Alterazioni Video ha proposto di codificare uno stile, l'Incompiuto Siciliano, per storicizzare il fenomeno delle opere incompiute. Abbiamo fatto un giro in città per capire se si può traslare questo paradigma interpretativo anche a Milano

# data[].attributes.body
Toyota Will Build Its Own Future City Full of Robots and Self-Driving Cars

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Toyota is building a model city being built from scratch that looks like a haven for cyclists and pedestrians.

Woven City, as it will be called, will be a test bed for studying autonomous and connected vehicle technology, Toyota says.

Groundbreaking on the 170-acre site is slated to take place in 2021.

Toyota is taking an unprecedented step forward in announcing that it will build an entire city from scratch, Woven City, in Japan. A private metropolis on 170 acres, designed by one visionary company and nestled at the foot of Mount Fuji? On one level, it's sounds like the description of Bond villain's lair, but on another level, it's kind of cool.

The goal of Toyota's Woven City is to be a test bed for various autonomous and connected-vehicle technologies. It's to be located on the former site of a Toyota production facility. Literal human beings will be the figurative guinea pigs-around 2000 of them eventually, Toyota says. There won't be much privacy involved, apparently: in a press conference announcing the venture, Toyota referred to such troubling ideas as robots that will live in people's homes to determine when they run out of milk, for instance.

When can you move in? Likely not for a while, or ever, as Toyota says invites will be sent mostly to Toyota employees and researchers. The only powered vehicles allowed in the city will be fully autonomous, zero-emissions transport devices such as, not coincidentally, the Toyota e-Palette.

So it's basically a future world where roads are populated only by pod-shaped devices without steering wheels. The city does look particularly appealing for cyclists and pedestrians, because part of the urban-planning strategy slated to be implemented by Danish architect Bjarke Ingals centers around separating roads into sections: one for higher-speed powered vehicles, one for slower vehicles such as bicycles, and one parklike path for walking that looks particularly aesthetically pleasing in the renderings Toyota has released so far.

The initial groundbreaking is scheduled for 2021, and we look forward to hearing more about this project to see if it's exactly as creepy as it sounds.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Toyota Will Build Its Own Future City Full of Robots and Self-Driving Cars

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toyota is building a model city being built from scratch that looks like a haven for cyclists and pedestrians. Woven City, as it will be called, will be a test bed for studying autonomous and connected vehicle technology, Toyota says. Groundbreaking on the 170-acre site is slated to take place in 2021.

# data[].attributes.body
Barbie on a horror trip across a garbage wasteland created by her plastic world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"We used horror film cliches to terrify our viewers about pollution," scriptwriter and director Vlad Yudi told The Calvert Journal. "This is like a form of anti-advertising, which encourages you to buy less, not more."

Yudi came up with the idea for the series after quitting his previous job as a modelling agent. "My conscience was uneasy because I worked in an industry which encouraged people to buy a lot of rubbish they didn't need, so I quit," he said. He then founded the studio Plastikwood, under the motto "Make art, not garbage."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Ukrainian animation series takes Barbie on a horror trip across a garbage wasteland created by her plastic world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"We used horror film cliches to terrify our viewers about pollution," scriptwriter and director Vlad Yudi told The Calvert Journal. "This is like a form of anti-advertising, which encourages you to buy less, not more." Yudi came up with the idea for the series after quitting his previous job as a modelling agent.

# data[].attributes.body
It’s time to stop designing “minimum viable products”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The very nature of business is being transformed by the cloud. In a world where products are no longer finished before they reach users, and incremental improvements are regularly deployed, the relationship with a consumer shifts from buying a product once (owning it) to paying a fee to use it for a set period (renting it). Whereas in the past we might have paid a few thousand dollars for a "finished" piece of software on a CD-ROM, we now pay a few dollars per month for regular access to a cloud-based service.

This shift to a recurring revenue model, or subscription business, has many advantages, which include scalability, predictability, and high customer engagement. You're never making a final sale-and you're relying instead on regular income through subscription fees. To illustrate this difference, it's like the distinction between dating and being married: when dating you always want to have your game on, but after getting married you might start taking your mate for granted and get a little lazy. When you're always "dating" your customer, it's critical to constantly please them, especially when they've come to the end of their subscription period and it's time to re-up.

The average consumer is now less often the stereotypical nerd of yore, and instead could be someone's hip over-seventy parent, an iconic reality TV star who's never used a spreadsheet before, or a teenager who sits at the athletes' table at lunch instead of the mathletes' one. A purely functional approach is no longer enough, and instead a richly experiential one has become table stakes because of the relatively new premium standards that have been set by mass market devices and services-think Apple and Instagram.

The minimum viable product (MVP) approach is the minimal or "lean" way to give consumers what they want without it necessarily being a fully realized idea. Given how the cloud works and its unprecedented ability to test incomplete ideas, the MVP approach has become the dominant methodology for pushing ideas out into the world. Although the definition of "viable" is debatable and rightly in the eye of the beholder, because the folks who actually build software systems usually come from an engineering background where "V" will signify being reliable and having as few defects as possible. They want to build a bridge that won't spontaneously collapse-why bother adorning it with a beautiful floral pattern if it can't withstand the weight of more than one vehicle?

A techie might be fine with a rough, purely functional experience, since their tolerance for discomfort is already high to begin with. But the general population has grown high expectations for their apps, so it's become important to redefine "viable" as needing to grant a degree of comfort and a modicum of delight. A professional test pilot in an experimental aircraft doesn't need a cozy place to sit, whereas a passenger on a commercial jet will expect a pillow and a soda-preferably the whole can. To make this point clearer in an MVP-ridden world of computational products that are missing creature comforts, I like to use the term "MVLP," where the "L" stands for "lovable."

Why? Because it's easy to forget that we're making viable experiences for more than just technical people who prize reliability and efficiency above all. I like to throw in the "L" to remind ourselves that, whether we think we're dating or married to the customer, we still need to play a flirtatious game to keep our relationship solid to remain in business with them.

The art and science of design is fundamentally tied to the Japanese philosophy of aichaku (AYE-chaw-kooh), literally "love-fit." This design word describes that special connection to something in your environment that fits your life so perfectly that you are immediately bonded to it. Being able to frame the construction of lovable, desirable experiences as proximate to the goals of making scalable, robust computational machinery is no longer just a "nice-to-have"-it's now a "need-to-have." Brokering this connection between the Temple of Tech and the Temple of Design is something I've been doing for most of my lifetime.

A few technology companies have benefited from the practiced vision of people who understand the psyche of software engineers and who have managed to convert that creative energy into experiences that any human being can love without the Temple of Design's help. So, departing from the usual design success example of Steve Jobs, I like to point to the early work of former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, back when she was VP of search products and user experience at Google. Mayer went in the exact opposite direction from prevailing approaches to visual design on the web by focusing entirely on the time it took for information to get from Google's cloud onto your machine.

In 2006, Mayer asserted that users "really respond to speed," pointing out how reducing a Google search from 100 kilobytes down to 70 kilobytes led to a material increase in traffic. Place this in contrast to what was at the time the natural inclination to want to deliver a "designed" experience with many full-screen photographic images and other bells and whistles. I attribute the brilliance of Mayer's strategy to Google's newfound position of design excellence, which is rapidly approaching Apple's, even though most celebratory articles largely misunderstand or omit Mayer's seminal contributions.

Mayer took something that engineers could understand and measure and then used Google's in-house expertise to ruthlessly pursue an experience that could be delivered quickly. This is not unlike what the McDonald brothers achieved when they figured out how to deliver a tasty burger at breathtaking speed with their Speedee Service System. They managed to address a fundamental experiential constraint lying at the foundation of well-designed experiences, which I highlighted as the third law in The Laws of Simplicity: Savings in time feel like simplicity.

Google's ability to deliver experiences with the right choice of engineering perspective strikes me as truly foundational to their product. Although this early approach often became conflated with a minimalist design approach of "less is more," or with just a nerdly bias, it's way more than that. It's the recognition that the "L" in MVLP needs to be taken seriously at the engineering level from the start, because everything depends upon computation. And so Google's selection of speed as a design attribute stood at the rare intersection of what could be loved by both engineers and nontechies, because when a web page loads quickly, it qualitatively feels divine. And once the technical challenge of achieving speed was mastered by Google, they smartly broadened their "L" approach to include nonengineering attributes such as beautiful, highly compressed imagery such as what is often featured on their home page.

The lovability of an MVP for nontechnical people can only be made possible by bringing businesspeople and designers early into the inception and construction of digital products of any scale. To slap on a business model to a finished computational machine is no longer a winning strategy; by the same token, spraying design all over it after it's done is a reliable way to lose. An integrated approach is necessary: one that appreciates what developers love to make happen-that is, bridges that don't fall down-in service of consumers who can pay a fair price for an experience that achieves a satisfying aichaku-style fit.
Excerpted from How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us by John Maeda with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © John Maeda, 2019.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's time to stop designing "minimum viable products"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The very nature of business is being transformed by the cloud. In a world where products are no longer finished before they reach users, and incremental improvements are regularly deployed, the relationship with a consumer shifts from buying a product once (owning it) to paying a fee to use it for a set period (renting it).

# data[].attributes.body
Coronavirus: we're in a real-time laboratory of a more sustainable urban future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums - a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about our urban world has come to a shuddering halt. For now.

The lockdown will, at some point, end. Urban life will begin to hum again to the familiar rhythms of work, leisure and shopping. This will be a huge relief for us all. Yet our towns and cities will never be the same. Indeed, things might get worse before they get better.

But it's also the case that other crises haven't gone away. Our relatively brief lockdown won't solve longer-term urban problems: dependence on fossil fuels, rising carbon emissions, poor air quality, dysfunctional housing markets, loss of biodiversity, divisions between the rich and the poor, low paid work. These are going to need our attention again.

The coronavirus crisis has offered a new perspective on these problems - and the limits of the way we have run our urban world over the last few decades. Cities are key nodes in our complex and highly connected global society, facilitating the rapid flow of people, goods and money, the rise of corporate wealth and the privatisation of land, assets and basic services. This has brought gains for some through foreign travel, an abundance of consumer products, inward investment and steady economic growth.

Pedro Lastra/Unsplash, FAL

This model has the perfect conditions for creating a crisis like coronavirus. It's also really bad at dealing with it. So something else is required to guide us into the future. The old story - in which cities compete against one another to improve their place in the global pecking order - was never great at meeting everyone's needs. But now it's looking very risky, given the need for increased cooperation and local resilience.

This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

After coronavirus, a key question emerges: what in essence, is a city for? Is it to pursue growth, attract inward investment and compete against global rivals? Or is it to maximise quality of life for all, build local resilience and sustainability? These are not always mutually exclusive, but it's a question of regaining balance. Beyond politics and ideology, most people simply want to be safe and healthy, especially faced by future threats, be they climate, weather or virus related.

Over the last 20 years as an urban geographer, I have been learning what needs to change to make cities more sustainable, green, fair and accessible. Recently, I described this in a book alongside a guide for civic leaders on how to tackle the climate emergency. Now, the lockdown has thrown us all into a real-time laboratory full of living examples of what a more sustainable future might look like. We have a perfect opportunity to study and explore which of these could be locked in to build sustainable, and safer, cities.

This has already started. Many things have become possible in the last few weeks. In many places, rapid changes have been unleashed to control the economy, health, transport and food. We are surrounded by fragments of progressive urban policy: eviction cancellations, nationalised services, free transport and healthcare, sick pay and wage guarantees. There is also a flourishing of community-based mutual aid networks as people volunteer to help the most vulnerable with daily tasks. Yesterday's radical ideas are becoming today's pragmatic choices.

We can learn a lot from these crisis-led innovations as we create more permanent urban policy choices to make life more pleasant and safer for all. Below I discuss a few key areas of city life that are currently providing some options.

Mike Egerton/PA Wire/PA Images

Breaking car dependency

Many people around the world are currently surrounded by much quieter streets. This presents us with a huge opportunity to re-imagine and lock in a different kind of urban mobility. Some cities are already doing so: Milan, for example, has announced that it will turn 35km of streets over to cyclists and pedestrians after the crisis.

Streets with fewer cars have shown people what more liveable, walkable neighbourhoods would look like. When lockdown is over and society returns to the huge task of reducing transport emissions and improving air quality, we need to remember that lower car use quickly became the new normal. This is important. Reducing traffic levels, some say by up to 60% between now and 2030, may be key to avoiding dangerous levels of global warming.

As I have previously outlined, this reduction would address many longstanding urban policy concerns - the erosion of public space, debt, the shift to out of town retail centres and the decline of local high streets, road deaths and casualties, poor air quality and growing carbon emissions. Accessible, affordable, zero-carbon, public transport is key to supporting a less car dependent urban future.

This crisis has revealed the significant inequalities in people's ability to move about cities. In many countries, including my own (the UK), deregulation and privatisation has facilitated corporate operators to run bits of the transport system in the interest of shareholders rather than users. Millions face transport poverty, where they can't afford to own and run a car, and lack access to affordable mass transit options. This has taken a new twist during this crisis. For many vulnerable people, whether there is a transit system to access hospitals, food and other essential services can be a matter of life or death.

COVID-19 has also highlighted how key workers underpin our daily lives. Creating good quality affordable transport for them is therefore crucial. Some awareness of this existed before coronavirus: in 2018 one French city introduced free buses, while Luxembourg made all its public transport free. But in the wake of the current crisis places across the world have been creating free transit, especially to key workers and for vulnerable people.

Julien Warnard/EPA-EFE

To meet ambitious targets for emission reductions, there needs to be a significant shift away from personal car use within a decade or so. The pandemic has offered insights into how this could be achieved through limiting car use for essential uses and those with mobility issues, with affordable public transport becoming the new norm for most people in cities.

The lockdown has also brought about significant reductions in air pollution. One study estimated that the lockdown in China saved 77,000 lives just by reducing this pollution. Such reductions are particularly key given that worse air quality could increase the risk of death from COVID-19. Given the health and social care costs associated with dealing with poor air quality, current increases in cleaner air need to be locked in to reduce the burden on health services for the future.

Aviation has taken a hit, with total flights declining by more than half during the crisis. This offers a glimpse of the types and volumes of flying that might feel surplus to requirements in the future.

Read more: What future do airlines have? Three experts discuss

Cities will need to move quickly to lock in these lower mobility expectations, especially low car volumes, less aviation, quality affordable mass transit and active travel. We are all living the reality of simply travelling less, and shifting activity online. This is a huge opportunity to review working practices, leisure and retail habits, and argue for spending to support affordable and sustainable travel for all.

The socially useful city

We have become used to the shortcomings of the modern city economy - low paid and precarious jobs, independent businesses squeezed out by large corporations, land and resources shifting from private to public hands, growing divisions between rich and poor neighbourhoods. Coronavirus has thrown many of these into stark relief.

But what has been most staggering about the response to the crisis is the rapid uptake of measures that only days ago would have been unthinkable: mortgage and rent holidays, statutory sick pay, shifts to nationalise services especially health and transport, wage guarantees, suspending evictions, and debt cancellations. The current crisis has started to rip up ideas led by the free market.

Will Oliver/EPA-EFE

We now seem to be revaluing what matters. Rather than being considered low skilled extras on the fringes of the economy, key workers, especially in health and food, are being revered for the role they play in supporting our wellbeing. Local shops are experiencing renewed support as they offer stronger personal connections and commitment to their community. These tendencies are an opportunity to restructure high streets and create diverse local markets which can meet community needs and build resilience to weather future crises.

The idea of a minimum income guarantee is also gaining momentum; a renewed interest in the idea of a universal and unconditional safety net that can offer dignity and safety and offer options for more sustainable living.

The social economy can provide further insights for refocusing city economies after coronavirus. Made up of community businesses, co-operatives and voluntary organisations, this social economy creates goods, services and employment that are more locally based, and community grounded in a range of areas: renewable energy, sustainable housing, food and micro finance. They build in benefits including local employment and procurement, fairer pay, better conditions, sustainable resource use, democratic accountability, and a commitment to social justice.

© Andy Lord, Author provided

It's also clear that parts of the economy, such as gambling and advertising corporations, bailiffs and corporate lobbyists, are less socially useful than others. There are signs of how the economy can change in positive directions. Many firms are temporarily shifting to more socially useful production, making, for example, hand sanitiser, ventilators and medical wear.

These short term glimpses of a more socially useful economy should provide inspiration when considering future urban economic planning. Factories might transition to manufacturing wind turbines, e-bikes, insulation panels and heat pumps. And excess downtown corporate office space or luxury apartments could be retrofitted to support socially useful activities - key worker accommodation, libraries, creches, day centres, colleges for transition skills, and co-working spaces.

A green urban commons

Further greening of cities after coronavirus would offer real and widespread benefits. During lockdown, many people are more aware how little green space they have access to on their doorsteps. Many are also stuck in cramped conditions with little or no access to outdoor spaces.

Quality public and green places need to be radically expanded so people can gather and heal after the trauma of this experience. Now is a good time to supercharge such plans. Diverse green spaces directly underpin our emotional and psychological wellbeing and offer a range of positive effects on carbon sequestration, air purification and wildlife preservation.

Neighbourhood design inspired by nature can support this. Interweaving the places we live with extensive natural spaces linked to active travel opportunities can reduce car dependency, increase biodiversity and create options for meaningful leisure on our doorsteps. They can also incorporate local food production and features to cope with flooding, such as sustainable urban drainage and water gardens, further increasing future crisis resilience.

There's also a strong rationale for prioritising street-by-street retrofit. In the event of future lockdowns during cold months, warm, low energy and well insulated homes can help reduce other problems around fuel poverty and excess winter deaths.

This moment offers a real opportunity to lay the foundations for a new deal for nature and animals. This is more important now than ever. Animals and wildlife, normally in rapid decline, are finding ways to regain a foothold in this respite of human activity - but they may be further threatened when lockdown comes to an end. Ways to create a more equal balance with our fellow species include expanding habitats for wildlife, restoring damaged natural areas, reducing dependency on intensive animal farming as well as meat-based diets.

© James McKay, Author provided

What next?

COVID-19 clearly presents a significant juncture. There is still trauma and loss ahead. There may be market collapse and a prolonged depression. There are also tendencies towards political and corporate bodies exploiting this crisis for their own ends.

For our urban world this could mean more of the negatives discussed earlier - insecurity, privatisation, division and authoritarianism. And as lockdown ends, there may be a rebound effect, as people understandably rush to embrace travel, work and consumerism, creating a significant emissions and pollution surge.

No particular urban future is inevitable. The future story, and reality, of our towns and cities is up for grabs. The positives that are glimpsed during this crisis could feasibly be locked in and scaled up to create a fairer, greener, safer urban future. We can all live well, and even flourish, in cities even if we have and do a little bit less of the things we have become used to. Revaluing what's important - community, friendship, family life - allows us to see how much we already have that can improve our wellbeing.

Often ideas start to converge under a single banner. Many in this article can be understood through the idea of the Green New Deal - a proposed set of policies to tackle climate change and inequality, create good jobs and protect nature. It's an approach which has a lot to offer cities after this coronavirus crisis. It points to an urban economy based on key foundations of public services, an economy operating within the ecological limits of our precious biosphere, with a social safety net for all. These ideas are now being seriously considered by some cities, such as Amsterdam, as they think about how to rebuild their economies.

Matej Kastelic/Shutterstock.com

How city governance responds in this crisis and afterwards will be key. There will certainly be a much bigger role for the state, and this might be more authoritarian as recent emergency powers over border controls, surveillance and enforced quarantines attest.

But there is a way of countering these tendencies - by creating an enabling, responsive, participatory state where solutions are reached with citizens, rather than imposed on them. A meaningful state-civil society contract means the state can act powerfully but also take the side of citizens, through, for example shifting assets, resources, taxes and welfare in their favour. We are seeing glimpses of this already through a new municiaplism, with Barcelona as one of the leading examples.

It's difficult to predict how things will actually turn out in such a fast moving environment. What I have presented here are some glimpses of doable, commonsense actions that could be used to build sustainable cities out of the coronavirus crisis.

Ten ideas to improve cities

These can be summed up in ten ideas that cities could implement after this crisis:

1. Reallocate road space for daily exercise and active travel

2. Subsidise free buses for key workers, and re-regulate public transport to create affordable, zero-carbon mass transit

3. Trial wage guarantee or basic income schemes to make sure no one is left behind

4. Shift subsidies to promote socially useful production

5. Plan to ensure homes are warm and comfortable for any future crises

6. Allocate unused land for exercise, leisure, wildlife and biodiversity

7. Support community businesses and provide land to increase the supply of local food

8. Commit to speed reductions to reduce deaths and ease the strain on health services

9. Create more support for local businesses and invest in local shops and high streets

10. Use indicators to count the things that matter, especially unpaid care work, key workers, quality of life, and environmental protection.

For you: more from our Insights series: To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation's evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coronavirus: we're in a real-time laboratory of a more sustainable urban future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums - a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew.

# data[].attributes.body
Pandemic Objects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pandemic Objects is an editorial project that compiles and reflects on objects that have taken on new meaning and purpose during the coronavirus outbreak. During times of pandemic, a host of everyday often-overlooked 'objects' (in the widest possible sense of the term) are suddenly charged with new urgency. Toilet paper becomes a symbol of public panic, a forehead thermometer a tool for social control, convention centres become hospitals, while parks become contested public commodities. By compiling these objects and reflecting on their changing purpose and meaning, this space aims to paint a unique picture of the pandemic and the pivotal role objects play within it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pandemic Objects is an editorial project that compiles and reflects on objects that have taken on new meaning and purpose during the coronavirus outbreak. During times of pandemic, a host of everyday often-overlooked 'objects' (in the widest possible sense of the term) are suddenly charged with new urgency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Of the many things we miss from our pre-pandemic lives, hugging may top the list. We asked scientists who study airborne viruses to teach us the safest way to hug.

Image

Credit... Eleni Kalorkoti

A Canadian woman was so desperate to hug her mother during quarantine that she created a "hug glove" using a clear tarp with sleeves so the women could hug through the plastic. A video of two young cousins in Kentucky hugging and weeping after weeks apart in quarantine was shared thousands of times.

"We did not expect for them to react the way they did," said Amber Collins, who recorded the reunion of her 8-year-old son, Huckston, with his cousin Rosalind Arnett, age 10. "They were so overjoyed they didn't know how to express themselves, except to cry. This hug shows how powerful the human touch truly is."

Not only do we miss hugs, we need them. Physical affection reduces stress by calming our sympathetic nervous system, which during times of worry releases damaging stress hormones into our bodies. In one series of studies, just holding hands with a loved one reduced the distress of an electric shock.

"Humans have brain pathways that are specifically dedicated to detecting affectionate touch," says Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and psychology professor at Stanford University. "Affectionate touch is how our biological systems communicate to one another that we are safe, that we are loved, and that we are not alone."

To learn the safest way to hug during a viral outbreak, I asked Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the world's leading experts on airborne disease transmission, about the risk of viral exposure during a hug. Based on mathematical models from a Hong Kong study that shows how respiratory viruses travel during close contact, Dr. Marr calculated that the risk of exposure during a brief hug can be surprisingly low - even if you hugged a person who didn't know they were infected and happened to cough.

Here's why. We don't know the exact dose required for the new coronavirus to make you sick, but estimates range from 200 to 1,000 copies of the virus. An average cough might carry anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 viruses, but most of the splatter lands on the ground or nearby surfaces. When people are in close contact, typically only about 2 percent of the liquid in the cough - or about 100 to 200 viruses - would be inhaled by or splashed on a person nearby. But only 1 percent of those stray particles - just one or two viruses - actually will be infectious.

"We don't know how many infectious viruses it takes to make you sick - probably more than one," said Dr. Marr. "If you don't talk or cough while hugging, the risk should be very low."

There's tremendous variability in how much virus a person sheds, so the safest thing is to avoid hugs. But if you need a hug, take precautions. Wear a mask. Hug outdoors. Try to avoid touching the other person's body or clothes with your face and your mask. Don't hug someone who is coughing or has other symptoms.

And remember that some hugs are riskier than others. Point your faces in opposite directions - the position of your face matters most. Don't talk or cough while you're hugging. And do it quickly. Approach each other and briefly embrace. When you are done, don't linger. Back away quickly so you don't breathe into each other's faces. Wash your hands afterward.

And try not to cry. Tears and runny noses increase risk for coming into contact with more fluids that contain the virus.

While some of the precautions may sound like a lot of effort for a simple hug, people need options given that the pandemic will be with us for a while, said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

"There's a real challenge right now for older people who worry that they won't be able to touch or connect with family for the rest of their lives," said Dr. Marcus. "Keeping hugs brief is particularly important because the risk of transmission increases with more prolonged contact."

Here are the Dos and Don'ts of hugging, based on the advice of Dr. Marr and other experts.

DON'T hug face-to-face

"This position is higher risk because the faces are so close together," said Dr. Marr. "When the shorter person looks up, their exhaled breath, because of its warmth and buoyancy, travels up into the taller person's breathing zone. If the taller person is looking down, there is opportunity for the huggers' exhaled and inhaled breaths to mingle."

DON'T hug cheeks together, facing the same direction

This position, with both huggers looking in the same direction, also is higher risk because each person's exhaled breath is in the other person's breathing zone.

DO hug facing opposite directions

For a safe, full-body hug, turn your faces in opposite directions, which prevents you from directly breathing each other's exhaled particles. Wear a mask.

DO let children hug you around the knees or waist

Hugging at knee or waist level lowers risk for direct exposure to droplets and aerosols because faces are far apart. There is potential for the child's face and mask to contaminate the adult's clothing. So you might consider changing clothes, and wash your hands after a visit that includes hugs. The adult also should look away so as not to breathe down on the child.

DO kiss your grandchild on the back of the head

In this scenario, the grandparent is minimally exposed to the child's exhaled breath. The child could be exposed to the taller person's breath, so kiss through a mask.

Julian Tang, a virologist and associate professor at the University of Leicester in England who studies how respiratory viruses travel through the air, said he would add one more precaution to a pandemic hug: Hold your breath.

"Most hugs last less than 10 seconds, so people should be able to manage this," Dr. Tang said. "Then back away to at least two meter separation before talking again to allow them to catch their breath at a safe distance. Holding your breath stops you exhaling any virus into their breathing zone, if you are unknowingly infected - and stops you inhaling any virus from them, if they are unknowingly infected."

Yuguo Li, a University of Hong Kong engineering professor and senior author on the paper that Dr. Marr cited to make the calculations, said that hugs probably pose less risk than a longer face-to-face conversation. "The exposure time is short, unlike conversation, which can be as long as we like," he said. "But no cheek kissing."

Dr. Li said the risk of viral exposure may be highest at the start of the hug, when two people approach each other and could breathe on each other, and at the end, when they pull apart. Wearing a mask is important, as is hand washing, because there's a low risk of picking up the virus from another person's hands, skin or clothes.

Dr. Marr noted that because the risk of a quick hug with precautions is very low but not zero, people should choose their hugs wisely.
Illustrations by Eleni Kalorkoti
"I would hug close friends, but I would skip more casual hugs," Dr. Marr said. "I would take the Marie Kondo approach - the hug has to spark joy."

Sign up for the Well Newsletter

Get the best of Well, with the latest on health, fitness and nutrition.
Sign Up

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Of the many things we miss from our pre-pandemic lives, hugging may top the list. We asked scientists who study airborne viruses to teach us the safest way to hug. A Canadian woman was so desperate to hug her mother during quarantine that she created a "hug glove" using a clear tarp with sleeves so the women could hug through the plastic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Database Updated 10.45am 5/4/2020
The fallout from COVID-19 feels overwhelming and infinite. I'm simultaneously frozen in fear of the short term effects - the havoc this is wreaking on our world's population, that it could impact my loved ones - and of future, long-term impacts. COVID-19 is a global earthquake, and we have to start bracing for the tsunami that follows. Our society's most integral elements are also our most vulnerable: the education system, small businesses, healthcare, and more. Even after we get through this, the fabric of our economy and society will change. So, I started mapping out the consequences in a database. As odd as it sounds, this attempt to bring some order to the madness swirling in my head helps me feel calmer.

I only have one singular perspective, though, and can't possibly think of every consequence. The below also started with thoughts from my wife, who is a family psychologist, and our 11- and 15-year-old children. We then opened it up to our personal networks to get as many inputs as possible.

My hope is that while we're doing our civic duty in quarantine, we can use some of that time to understand the fundamental changes that will take place when we come out and think about solutions to the new problems we'll face. Some of the database below also has small potential silver linings, like a reduction in vaping and an improvement of our environment. These small positives don't come close to outweighing the negatives, but I think it's important to think about them, too, and how we can keep the momentum going for those few positives.

Visual Build of Selected Impacts
COVID Impact
Now, we are opening the database up to you. The more voices we have here, the better we can prepare for what's to come after. If you want to contribute your thoughts, please email us your additional ideas, preferably in the template provided below - then send to mjones@science-inc.com.
SUBMIT YOUR CONTENT HERE As a side note, from my personal experience, older members of our family seem to think this current situation is no big deal, while I am finding younger people experiencing this current global state see it as highly serious and long lasting. I wonder if older experienced humans see this like a "moment in time" that eventually is smoothed over, yet younger people in life feel its severity greater.
社会距離戦略（Social Distancing）を実践する欧米では、時代を先取りするインキュベータやアントレプレナーが全く新しい生活様式の世界を見据えて、社会、経済、政治、教育、医療、文化など様々な分野において、新しい財・サービスの企画に取り組んでいます。今は平時では取り組めない社会実験をするための絶好の機会でもあり、水面下でPoCに取り組み、新事業の基盤作りが進んでいます。

弊社のビジネスパートナーであるScience (ロサンゼルスのインキュベーター)のMike Jones CEOは、想定される「ポスト・コロナウィルス世界」を"COVID-19's Ripple Effect: Mapping Out The Societal & Economic Consequences"（以下URLの通り）という内容でまとめています。
https://www.notion.so/COVID-19-s-Ripple-Effect-Mapping-Out-The-Societal-Economic-Consequences-ee320975f0d64cbc8a6c9df92b14348b
Michael Jones (Science, Inc.): COVID-19's Ripple Effect: Mapping Out The Societal & Economic Consequences

We are all in this together, and we'll have to work together to get through it.

Strong additional DB of Post COVID impact here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17YkH4kc63t7JI7JJZR6i3-iebJd7kfRAzAK_ssl8bt4/preview

Great resource shared to me by @ezyjules from @gonsanchezs referencing Impact on European Tech - thanks for the reference! Link here!

Post Pandemic Impact on Education

We believe impact to education will be one of the largest across all sectors. We believe that certain families will choose not to send their children back to school for a variety of reasons, that will drive schools to have fewer students, lowering budgets and pushing down an already stressed educational system. The impact here may result in growth of homeschool programs and alternative schooling systems.

"I think I like homeschooling better than normal school - I think I am learning more."

"My kid seems happier, no more bulling, no more social issues."

Summary:

Not all students will return back to school

Some students will continue to homeschool

Some students may enter the work force early

Some students will permanently drop out of the education system

Data
Post Pandemic Impact on Retail & Brands & Commerce

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
COVID-19's Ripple Effect: Mapping Out The Societal & Economic Consequences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Database Updated 10.45am 5/4/2020 I only have one singular perspective, though, and can't possibly think of every consequence. The below also started with thoughts from my wife, who is a family psychologist, and our 11- and 15-year-old children. We then opened it up to our personal networks to get as many inputs as possible.

# data[].attributes.body
Ikea refunds the cost of the trip to the store

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
IKEA customers in Dubai can now pay for items using the time they've spent travelling to IKEA's ... [+]
NurPhoto via Getty Images

IKEA is now letting customers pay for goods with their time. Yes, that's right: the more time customers spend travelling to IKEA, the more they can buy. Because beginning from this month, IKEA Dubai is running a campaign that will allow customers to spend their time as a currency, simply by showing IKEA checkout staff their Google Maps timeline, which proves how much time they've spent travelling to IKEA stores.

While restricted at this moment in time to IKEA Dubai, this promotion opens the door to a significant and profound change in how consumers purchase goods, and in how they relate to brands. Timed to coincide with the opening of a new store in Jebel Ali, this new campaign encourages potential customers to visit IKEA more frequently, so that they can notch up more time spent travelling to IKEA's outlets. By extension, it encourages them to spend more time in IKEA's stores, which in turn will ultimately encourage them to buy more goods.

Dubbed "Buy With Your Time," the idea behind the new promotion is that customers usually spend an inordinate amount of time travelling to IKEA outlets, usually because said outlets reside on the outskirts of towns. In view of this, IKEA has added "time currency" prices for every item in its Dubai stores, which are based on the average Dubai salary. As such, customers are now able to buy products using all the time they've spent travelling to IKEA over the years (in addition to the usual dirhams).

"Before the birth of this campaign, we realised two things: time is precious today, and many loyal IKEA customers spend a significant chunk of it visiting our locations, which are sometimes away from the city centre," said an IKEA spokesperson. "We think it's only right to reward our customers' efforts by repaying them for the time spent reaching us. It's our way of helping the Dubai community make the most of every minute."

Of course, the really significant aspect of this story isn't the fact that you can now spend time as a currency in IKEA. Rather, the involvement of Google Maps in the promotion entails that people who want to spend their time as currency have to not only download Google Maps, but also have to let it track them wherever they travel. In other words, the promotion is another step towards normalizing the idea that it's okay to be watched wherever we go so long as we receive 'free stuff' in exchange. Given that Google recently became a trillion-dollar company, it's not entirely clear if the trade is a fair one.

On top of this, the promotion is an obvious attempt to entice people into spending even more time travelling to IKEA. Yes, we may receive some rewards for spending half an hour or more at a time travelling to IKEA. But the long-term effect will be to seduce us into giving away even more time than we would otherwise have done. So instead of, say, learning a new language, a new musical instrument, or working out how to collectively organise a political challenge to the growing authoritarianism of our era, our time will be increasingly devoted to becoming increasingly materialist. We'll be 'compensated' for the time we've lost by losing even more of it.

That's why IKEA's latest innovation could potentially become very significant. In letting us pay for goods with time, it could encourage more companies to follow its example. And eventually, this novel ability could induce us to devote as much time as possible to the world's brands and corporations, as if they don't already take enough of our time as it is.

... Read More

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
IKEA Becomes First Retailer To Let Customers Pay Using Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
IKEA is now letting customers pay for goods with their time. Yes, that's right: the more time customers spend travelling to IKEA, the more they can buy. Because beginning from this month, IKEA Dubai is running a campaign that will allow customers to spend their time as a currency, simply by showing IKEA checkout staff their Google Maps timeline, which proves how much time they've spent travelling to IKEA stores.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last week, 25 million Americans returned to public life. As more and more governors relax their stay-at-home orders and restrictions on businesses, that number will only grow, even as COVID-19 cases around the country remain higher than public health experts consider safe. We are at a precarious moment as a country, where we must balance recovery and caution.

Across the spectrum, in large cities and small towns, outdoor public spaces must be a central part of the path forward. People need a way to go back to work, and the world wants to get out of the house. Constituents are desperate to hear new messages from political leaders, not just about whether or not to return to public life, but about how.

A street market in Kalaw, Myanmar, has adapted brilliantly to the need for physical distancing. Photo by Chan Myae Aung.

Parks have been an early beacon of hope during the pandemic; their generous paths and calming greenery have provided people with a psychological safety valve in a time of anxiety. However, as many public health officials have said, we should encourage people to use public spaces close to home, and not everyone has access to a park in their neighborhood. What's more, not everyone has the time to take a stroll in the park. Essential workers and parents, among others, need public spaces that are useful as well as restful.

The sidewalks, streets, plazas and parking lots in every neighborhood are an asset that is waiting to be put to work. Many cities including San Francisco, Oakland, New York, and Seattle are closing streets to traffic to increase the usable pedestrian space for residents. But no city has yet fulfilled the promise of what these spaces can do beyond walking, biking, and perhaps dining outdoors.

To avoid a resurgence in infection and to recover equitably, cities must think more expansively about how all kinds of outdoor, everyday spaces can fulfill people's daily needs, and work directly with the communities most affected by the virus and its economic fallout.

Thinking Bigger About the Public Realm

In the New York Times recently, Dr. Marty Makary at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health made the case that for the foreseeable future, many activities will be safer outdoors than indoors. "These findings have implications for restaurants and other businesses and activities that are able to use outdoor areas," says Makary. "Yoga and other fitness activities should resume outside when possible. Similarly, instead of having someone to your home for a meal, consider having a meal in your yard or at a park, six feet apart."

North American cities have long resisted allowing a rich mixture of uses in public space, with regulations blocking activities that would be acceptable in many other parts of the world. Now is the time to rethink those regulations-and fast. Public spaces should become the setting for every reasonable type of use to allow communities to reopen. They should be closely controlled for adherence to CDC guidelines and the latest research, but local regulations prohibiting uses outside should be lifted.

Simple solutions like The Better Block's DIY market stands are already helping restaurants sell their extra stock outdoors in Dallas, Texas. Photos courtesy of The Better Block.

Businesses can open up on streets, sidewalks and plazas, where they can achieve some of their operations more safely than indoors. Beyond restaurants, cities could explore fresh food and markets, vending and outdoor retailing, and even some services like laundry pick-up and drop-off, pet grooming, and perhaps soon, haircuts and manicures.

What about free activities that might help parents in their current childcare marathon, or help the elderly reconnect with family and friends, even at a distance? Free programming that can rebuild health and a sense of community could roll out of community centers and libraries and into neighborhood streets and parking lots. Imagine physically distanced exercise programs, walking groups, story time, and even outdoor theater and small concerts. Raised-bed planters of community-tended vegetables and flowers could sprout up in our underused streets and parking lots. Municipal services can also be brought into neighborhoods that lack the basics: meal distribution, temporary health clinics, temporary housing, and other social services.

A DIY physically distanced exercise class in Little Mountain, Wales. Photo by Craig Colville.

Every community also has an abundance of its own talents and passions that could make our streets more beautiful and lively, even at a distance. Traditional downtown and neighborhood organizations can help deliver and manage safe programming in places where public space managers never delivered it before. Local artists and musicians can bring joy and entertainment, and volunteers can help with building, maintaining, educating visitors about physical distancing, and distributing masks.

These ideas are not that radical. Many cities have now opened roadways to pedestrians and cyclists as a means to provide additional space for social distancing throughout the city. The best examples have created networks that help people get where they need to go without crowding into public transit. A growing number of cities, like Tampa, Florida, and Cincinnati, Ohio, have opened road space to struggling restaurants, as they reopen at a much reduced capacity. Rockland, Maine, plans to reopen its entire Main Street outdoors. Montreal, Quebec, has become the first North American city to announce that it would implement " superblocks" in their streets, modeled after Barcelona's well-known initiative.

Restaurants in Tampa, Florida, recently reopened in the streets to allow for physical distancing. Photo by Ryan Smith.

Open-air farmers markets provide a leading model for how public spaces can serve everyday needs while taking " lighter, quicker, cheaper" steps to adapt to physical distancing. Over a dozen states declared these public spaces essential services, even during the height of the lockdown, and market managers and vendors rose to the occasion in record time. They applied new strategies, both digital and physical, high tech and low tech-from online to roadside pickup, cashless payment to rearranging pop-up tents, increased communications to one-way lanes. Many continued to provide access to nutritional assistance programs, providing affordable access to healthy food. And every week on market day, they adapt, learn, and iterate.

As part of our Market Cities Initiative, Project for Public Spaces worked with Arup to develop guidelines for the reopening of Bloomfield Saturday Market in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photos courtesy of the Bloomfield Saturday Market.

The missing link is for advocates, government agencies, and the civic sector to break out of their usual silos of discipline and sector and to apply these strategies in tandem with other public health, social service, and economic stimulus efforts. If we accomplish this, public space can be the frontline of our recovery, places to safely access food, health resources, employment, social infrastructure, and much more.

Public Spaces by and for All

Initially, some high profile voices in the mainstream media latched onto density as a simple explanation for the spread of the coronavirus, but it has become abundantly clear that the geography of inequality is more to the point.

Here in New York, rates in densest Manhattan remain low, as many wealthier New Yorkers have jobs that allow them to work from home and have goods delivered, and places elsewhere to flee the city altogether. Meanwhile, moderately dense Queens and the Bronx have been hit the hardest. One analysis by Buzzfeed pointed out that the factors most strongly correlated with infection were, in fact, household size and the presence of a frontline worker in the home. These are often Black and brown communities that were already under stress from insecure and overcrowded housing, preexisting health conditions, poor air quality, poor access to health food, aggressive policing, and a limited and badly maintained public realm. The pattern is similar in other cities: a "donut," with the downtown and gentrified inner neighborhoods largely spared, and a crisis unfolding in distressed outer neighborhoods. In a sense, complaints about density are the complaints of the privileged few who have the means to contemplate an alternative.

The City of Seattle recently announced that its open streets network, pictured above, would become permanent (though advocates still think they could do more). Photo courtesy of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

Open streets and public markets, parks and cultural institutions are all merely means of recovery-not ends in themselves. Public space advocates of all stripes should be careful not to mistake their personal cause for the needs of others. Instead, as we have long argued, effective public space improvements require building a genuine working relationship with the current and future users of the space.

For example, on a recent Brookings Institution webinar I had the pleasure to take part in, Warren Logan, Policy Director of Mobility and Inter Agency Relations with the City of Oakland, spoke candidly about the uneven local response to their lauded Slow Streets initiative, which has become a flagship for American transportation advocates. The initiative made headlines by opening up 74 miles of roadway to pedestrians and cyclists across the city. It's worth noting that this apparently rapid response did not arise out of thin air. It fast-tracked an existing bicycle plan for the city, which included an equity framework and robust community engagement to ensure that the network reached a diversity of communities and met their needs.

Even with this foundation, however, different communities still had different responses to Slow Streets. In West Oakland, the response has been enthusiastic, with some calling for the changes to become permanent. In East Oakland, on the other hand, the response has been mixed. Some questioned why the City would focus on pedestrianization when there aren't enough masks, testing, or jobs in their community. Others worried about policing. As one resident asked Logan, "Am I going to be arrested for going outside when you told me not to?" Since rolling out Slow Streets, Logan has spent much of his time listening, reassuring, measuring, and adapting.

These kinds of objections, often from communities of color, must be taken seriously by transportation advocates and placemakers. Professionals and advocates from the worlds of economic development, public health, criminal justice reform, and public space design and management must come together to effectively address the needs of neighborhoods where people's lives and livelihoods are under threat.

Visual notes from "Reimagining and Repurposing Engagement during COVID-19," a webinar organized by Project for Public Spaces and Connect the Dots. Illustration by Angelia Yingge Xu.

Furthermore, the people most affected by this pandemic must be directly involved in the response. Community engagement may be challenging during this pandemic, but as we discussed in a recent webinar, we can adapt through creative combinations of digital tools and safe outdoor strategies. While the need is urgent, a purely technocratic response will miss important parts of people's lived experience, and leave their own ideas and contributions on the table.

The Path Forward

Now is not the time to cut funds to the agencies and organizations that steward our public realm. On the contrary, now is the time to finally undo what Jane Jacobs once called the " great unbalance" in the way we fund public space: to respond nimbly and adapt continuously, we must invest in the ongoing management, programming, and refinement of public space, rather than expensive capital improvements alone.

In municipal budgets, cities should treat public spaces as what they are: fundamental building blocks of our health, social resilience, and democracy. Parks and other public spaces have long been a last priority across the board compared to other types of infrastructure. New York City parks, for example, account for less than 1% of the city's budget, and staffing is 35% lower than it was in 1976. Likewise, year after year public markets struggle for the attention of city leaders. Where they flourish, it is usually despite the fact that there is no public funding or city-wide strategy for them to expand. Other investments in public space management, such as through business improvement districts, are based on assessing surrounding property owners, leaving behind neighborhoods that cannot pay to play.

Place managers can provide the logistical muscle we need to bring more and more of our daily lives outdoors. They can serve as the great connectors, breaking down the silos between placemaking, transportation, public health, economic stimulus, food systems, social justice, and social services. They can take on the task of inviting community members into the process of recovery-and in neighborhoods that lack such managers, cities can strengthen local leadership by investing in existing neighborhood groups and by building inclusive new coalitions through training and funding.

By working together, municipalities and place managers can help lay the groundwork for fairer and more resilient cities and towns. But this all depends on whether or not cities have the political courage to embrace one simple fact: The recovery will happen in public space.

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Heading Two

Heading Three

Heading Four

Heading Five

Heading Six

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Here is some highlighted text from the article.

Caption

Caption

Caption

Caption

Bulleted List Item 1 Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Bulleted List Item 2 Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

1. Ordered List Item 1

2. Ordered List Item 2

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Recovery Will Happen in Public Space

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last week, 25 million Americans returned to public life. As more and more governors relax their stay-at-home orders and restrictions on businesses, that number will only grow, even as COVID-19 cases around the country remain higher than public health experts consider safe. We are at a precarious moment as a country, where we must balance recovery and caution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Formats Unpacked is a newsletter by the team at Storythings.

Industry experts unpack one of their favourite formats and are asked one simple question: What's the magic that made it special?

Each week they break down the popular and lesser known formats from the worlds of TV, radio, podcasts, online, video, games, newspapers, magazines, and more.

I'm fascinated by the hidden magic in formats that makes audiences keep coming back. I wanted to learn more but couldn't find anyone writing about it. So I started this.

Why are we obsessed with formats?

At Storythings we believe formats are powerful storytelling tools for three reasons:

They give structure to your stories.

1. They help audiences manage their attention by signalling to them what to expect before they click.

2. They are iterative and repeatable.

If you work in TV or Radio you know this. But a lot of clients we work with think in terms of one-off campaigns. Format Thinking is a missed opportunity that we want to encourage.

Sign up and get format insights into your inbox every Wednesday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Formats Unpacked is a newsletter by the team at Storythings. Industry experts unpack one of their favourite formats and are asked one simple question: What's the magic that made it special? Each week they break down the popular and lesser known formats from the worlds of TV, radio, podcasts, online, video, games, newspapers, magazines, and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world's first offices - that of the East India Company in London - sat down to write a letter to a friend. If the man was excited to be working in a building that was revolutionary, or thrilled to be part of a novel institution which would transform the world in the centuries that followed, he showed little sign of it. "You don't know how wearisome it is", wrote Charles Lamb, "to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four." His letter grew ever-less enthusiastic, as he wished for "a few years between the grave and the desk". No matter, he concluded, "they are the same."

The world that Lamb wrote from is now long gone. The infamous East India Company collapsed in ignominy in the 1850s. Its most famous legacy, British colonial rule in India, disintegrated a century later. But his letter resonates today, because, while other empires have fallen, the empire of the office has triumphed over modern professional life.

The dimensions of this empire are awesome. Its population runs into hundreds of millions, drawn from every nation on Earth. It dominates the skylines of our cities - their tallest buildings are no longer cathedrals or temples but multi-storey vats filled with workers. It delineates much of our lives. If you are a hardworking citizen of this empire you will spend more waking hours with the irritating colleague to your left whose spare shoes invade your footwell than with your husband or wife, lover or children.

Or rather you used to. This spring, almost overnight, the world's offices emptied. In New York and Paris, in Madrid and Milan, they ready themselves for commuters who never come. Empty lifts slide up and down announcing floor numbers to empty vestibules; water coolers hum and gurgle, cooling water that no one will drink. For the moment, office life is over.

Even before coronavirus struck, the reign of the office had started to look a little shaky. A combination of rising rents, the digital revolution and increased demands for flexible working meant its population was slowly emigrating to different milieux. More than half of the American workforce already worked remotely, at least some of the time. Across the world, home working had been rising steadily for a decade. Pundits predicted that it would increase further. No one imagined that a dramatic spike would come so soon.

It's too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one's back on what Philip Larkin called "the toad work" are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.

But we shouldn't let sentimentality cloud us. Offices have always been profoundly flawed spaces. Those of the East India Company, among the world's first, were built more for bombast than bureaucracy. They were sermons in stone, and the solidity of every marble step, the elegance of every Palladian pillar, were intended to speak volumes about the profitability and smooth functioning within. This was nonsense, of course. Created to ensure efficiency, offices immediately institutionalised idleness. A genteel arms race arose as managers tried to make their minions work, and the minions tried their damnedest to avoid it. East India House, in which Lamb worked, could give call centres a run for their money in the art of micro-managing. At the start of the 19th century, the company introduced an attendance book for employees to sign when they arrived, when they left and every 15 minutes in between. Not that it proved much use. "It annoys Dodwell amazingly," wrote Lamb. "He sometimes has to sign six or seven times while he is reading the newspaper."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world's first offices - that of the East India Company in London - sat down to write a letter to a friend.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
>this first draft of The Pop-Up Playhouse > > > >this first draft of The Pop-Up Playhouse built by Ed Naujokas and Tassos Stevens > > > >this first draft of The Pop-Up Playhouse built by Ed Naujokas and Tassos Stevens illustrations by Hoda Adra > > > >this first draft of The Pop-Up Playhouse built by Ed Naujokas and Tassos Stevens illustrations by Hoda Adra produced by Ellie Browning > > >

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A crowdsourced set of tech, tools and data relating to the Coronavirus pandemic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Pentagon recently released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy - one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show ... well, it's not exactly clear.

There are various objects - two of which look like aircraft - spinning through the sky and moving in ways that defy easy explanation. As the images bop across the screen, you can hear the pilots' excitement and confusion in real time as they track whatever it is they're seeing.

I'm not what you would call a UFO enthusiast, but the videos are the most compelling I've ever seen. They seem to confirm, at the very least, that UFOs are real - not that aliens exist, but that there are unidentified objects buzzing around the sky.

Now, do I think aliens are real? Yeah, probably. Are they flying spaceships into our atmosphere? Who the hell knows?

The best anyone can say is that there's a non-zero chance that some of these UFOs were made by non-human hands, and that, I'd argue, is reason enough to talk about them. But it's barely cracked the news cycle. Even in a pandemic, you'd think we'd have a little time for UFO talk.

So in an attempt to force a UFO conversation into the public discourse, I contacted Alexander Wendt, a professor of international relations at Ohio State University. Wendt is a giant in his field of IR theory, but in the past 15 years or so, he's become an amateur ufologist. He wrote an academic article about the political implications of UFOs in 2008, and, more recently, he gave a TEDx talk calling out the "taboo" against studying UFOs.

Wendt is about the closest thing you'll find to a UFO expert in a world in which ufology isn't a real science. Like other enthusiasts, he's spent a lot of time looking at the evidence, thinking about the stakes, and theorizing about why extraterrestrials would visit Earth in the first place.

In this conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, we discuss why scientists refuse to take UFOs seriously, why he thinks there's a good chance ETs are behind the aircraft in those videos, and why he believes the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the most significant event in human history.

Sean Illing

Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

Alexander Wendt

Well, it's kind of like asking if somebody believes in God. It's just an odd question. I certainly believe that it's very likely there's extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe, and I suspect even most scientists might agree with that now. The real question is, are ETs here? And that's obviously a much more debatable question.

Sean Illing

Are they here?

Alexander Wendt

I think the odds are high enough that we should be investigating it. It's as simple as that.

Sean Illing

Why would aliens conceal their existence? I know you have theories on this -

Alexander Wendt

It's possible they've been here all along. And that's something that I've been thinking about lately, which is a bit unsettling. Because it means it's their planet and not ours. They could just be intergalactic tourists. Maybe they're looking for certain minerals. It could just be scientific curiosity. It could be that they're extracting our DNA. I mean, who knows? I have no idea. All I know is that if they are here, they seem to be peaceful.

Sean Illing

You've thought about this a lot, Alex. You must have a hunch as to which of those scenarios is most likely.

Alexander Wendt

I think if they are here, they've probably been here a very long time - that's my guess. And, look, there are medieval woodcuts that seem to show UFOs. There are UFO stories in the Bible, apparently, or at least stories that are interpreted that way. So I think they've probably been here a long time if they're here.

Sean Illing

We're having this conversation because you've been very public about calling out a "taboo" against studying UFOs. What's your claim here?

Alexander Wendt

It's very simple. There are things going on in the sky that are strange and do not have an obvious explanation. These are UFOs, and like any other unidentified phenomenon, human beings are curious creatures and normally scientists will rush out to study whatever we find fascinating or puzzling. But in this case, scientists won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. And that's the taboo.

So even though the Navy is now saying, "Hey, we've got UFOs on film, here they are," the scientists are still not going to study them. So there seems to be something blocking the scientific community from engaging this phenomenon, even though anything else even remotely this interesting would generate limitless research dollars.

Sean Illing

Is this some kind of conspiracy of silence? How does a taboo like this take hold in the first place?

Alexander Wendt

We argued in our 2008 academic paper that the modern state is what we call anthropocentric. Basically, that means human beings are sovereigns. In ancient times, it was the gods or nature that was thought to rule over everything. Now it's human beings. And this principle is embodied in the state. And if you call that into question, if you call into question that the state is not the only potential sovereign here, the whole legitimacy of the state is called into question. So the whole worldview of the modern state is very vulnerable to the UFO question. You can't even ask the question because it raises the possibility that there could be ETs here. And that would just blow everything wide open.

Sean Illing

That's an argument for why states might not be interested in this question, but it doesn't explain why non-state actors or the private sector isn't particularly eager to study this.

Alexander Wendt

Now, that's a very good point. In our paper, we only dealt with states. What's interesting lately is that states seem more willing to engage with this than scientists. I think there's a hubris in the scientific community, a belief that human beings are the most intelligent species on this planet, and it's very hard to come to grips with the idea that if there are aliens here, they're obviously much smarter than we are.

I've received a lot of emails from individual scientists in response to my TEDx talk. And all of them said the same thing, which is, "Thank you, we wish we could study this, but we can't because our lives depend on getting grants from the government and other research institutes, and if anybody gets worried that we're interested in UFOs, boom, they won't get a cent and their careers will be in the tank." But I still think most scientists believe this is all nonsense anyway, and that's frankly disappointing.

"I worry about my fellow human beings more than I worry about the aliens"

Sean Illing

I think there are other explanations here, but we'll get to that. First, let's talk about these Navy videos. What do you think you're seeing when you watch these?

Alexander Wendt

The first thing I'd say is that it doesn't matter what I think because I'm not a scientist, right? I don't know what's on those videos. But to me, I listened to the pilots, to their voices, and I trust them much more than I would trust myself. And they're clearly seeing something extraordinary. Now, whether it's alien life, who knows? It's a plausible explanation. My point is that we should be agnostic about this and simply study it scientifically. Let's do the science and then we can talk about what we found. Until we've done that, it's all bullshit.

Sean Illing

Is it possible that there is no real taboo and that the lack of rigorous study has more to do with the limits of the field or the paucity of evidence than anything else?

Alexander Wendt

Well, it's true that the evidence we have is very vague. Most of it is anecdotal. It's not scientific. A lot of it is eyewitness reports. On the other hand, the evidence has been going on for many decades. It's very consistent, in many ways. It's all over the world. There's a huge number of cases and there is physical evidence in the form of videos or radar accounts. And when that evidence comes from the US Navy, it's safe to say that it's legit and not doctored.

Sean Illing

But what would a science of UFOs even look like? How do we study empirically something for which there's so little empirical evidence?

Alexander Wendt

Like Elizabeth Warren says, I have a plan for that.

Sean Illing

Great, let's hear it.

Alexander Wendt

About five years ago, some colleagues of mine and I formed a nonprofit called UFODATA. And the objective we set for the nonprofit was to create a ground-based network of surveillance stations that would monitor the sky 24/7 with cameras and various other technologies, looking for UFOs. Anything comes along, boom, the cameras start snapping pictures or radar or film until the UFO passes. The technology is very sophisticated now and very cheap.

Sean Illing

I don't quite understand the need for that. There are thousands of satellites and radar systems operating all over the world at every moment, surveilling and recording and tracking. An obvious question is, why are there not more sightings? Why is there not more evidence? Why are there so few compelling pieces of evidence?

Alexander Wendt

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the parameters of these technologies that we use to look for asteroids and meteors and all these other things are such that UFOs may not be within those parameters. And so they'll just be discarded as noise or unnoticeable junk. So that's one explanation for why we see less than we might.

Secondly, no one has bothered to actually look for UFOs. We're looking for ETs around distant stars, we're looking for comets, we're looking at all kinds of other things in the atmosphere. No one, as far as I know, is seriously looking for UFOs. But to me, it doesn't really matter why we don't see more. What matters is those three videos that the Navy released. I defy anyone to watch those and come away thinking there's nothing there worth investigating. Those pilots who spent thousands of hours in the sky, who are flying the most sophisticated machines in the entire world, are seeing something that they have never seen before and are completely blown away by it.

Again, these are videos released by the Navy, and so I'm inclined to believe what I'm seeing. What's striking is that the objects don't behave like natural phenomena. One of the objects rotates as it's flying against the wind, which is not normal. And the pilots are clearly under the impression that these objects are under intelligent control.

Sean Illing

Are you persuaded at all by some of the non-ET explanations? For instance, that some of the UFOs are actually weather balloons or drones or shadows of aircraft above, and that what appear to be advanced maneuvers are really just the product of infrared glare or camera angles or eyewitness errors.

Alexander Wendt

I think the majority of UFO reports probably have conventional explanations like that and they're just misidentifications by observers on the ground. That's probably the majority of cases. So it's really the hardcore minority cases that don't have those kinds of obvious explanations. And that's where we have better physical evidence, or authoritative sources, like the military. And it's really easy to throw out skeptical possibilities. But I look at those videos and they don't look fake to me at all.

Sean Illing

No, they don't.

Alexander Wendt

The pilots clearly don't think so, either.

Sean Illing

Tell me the truth: You think it's aliens, right?

Alexander Wendt

I think so. If I were placing a bet, I guess I would say 51 to 49 in favor of ETs. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if the opposite were true. Again, we haven't done the science.

Sean Illing

That's a big number, Alex.

Alexander Wendt

It is.

Sean Illing

To say that something is hard to explain is not to say that it's inexplicable, though. It's entirely possible - likely, even - that there's a simple account of these encounters and we just don't have it yet. What's the Occam's razor explanation for these UFO sightings?

Alexander Wendt

To me, the Occam's razor explanation is ETs.

Sean Illing

Really?

Alexander Wendt

It explains all the cases just like that. And you don't need a whole bunch of different theories or assumptions for all these different phenomena, right? Because the phenomena are different. But I guess I don't see a competing explanation of any kind that would explain some of the stuff that we either have on film or the pilots have seen. And, again, why didn't the military come up with these alternative explanations? They must have thought about them and concluded it doesn't fit the data.

Sean Illing

I'm not sure that's right. They may have a strong hunch but simply can't prove it, so it remains officially "unidentified." We can definitely say that the chances that aliens are involved is non-zero, but beyond that, I have no idea.

Alexander Wendt

That's pretty close to my position.

Sean Illing

But a weather balloon or malfunctioning radar systems or just eyewitness mistakes seem like much simpler explanations.

Alexander Wendt

But you'd have to explain why multiple instruments were all malfunctioning in the same way at the same time. You've got multiple jets up there, you've got radar on the ships down below tracking at the same time. You've got communications going on with people on the ships and the planes and the guys in the planes. So whatever explanations people do offer, they've got to fit the data.

It doesn't look like that was a weather balloon that those guys were seeing. I assume professional fighter pilots are pretty good at spotting and recognizing weather balloons, and surely that's a common occurrence. It's easy to be a skeptic here, I get that. All I'm saying is that there's enough here to justify the science. The puzzle is that we're not doing the science. To me, that's the essential phenomenon that's of interest.

Sean Illing

Why should scientists care about UFOs? Why should philosophers care? Why should anyone care?

Alexander Wendt

Because if ETs were discovered, it would be the most important event in human history.

Sean Illing

Why?

Alexander Wendt

If it became known, it could be a very dangerous event in the sense that we might see a collapse of state authority. We might see chaos. The possibility of contact with a civilization that has vastly more knowledge than we do is exciting and terrifying and unpredictable.

Sean Illing

I mean, isn't that a case for putting our heads down and minding our fucking business? Stephen Hawking famously warned humanity about the perils of first contact with an alien species. "If aliens visit us," he said, "the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."

Was he wrong?

Alexander Wendt

My feeling is that if they're here, they're almost certainly peaceful, because if they were not peaceful they would have wiped us out a long time ago. They can probably do it very quickly. So my assumption is they don't mean any harm. But it's still the case that society could implode or destabilize as a result of colliding with ETs.

Sean Illing

That's a big assumption. If they are here, they might be peaceful, sure. But they might also be on a scouting operation. They might be looking for holes in our defenses, weaknesses in our societies and in our physical bodies. The point, obviously, is that we have no freaking idea. So maybe that's the case for following Hawking's lead here, right? Maybe it's best to not go poking about for superior life.

Alexander Wendt

I've thought about this, and I worry less about poking around and getting conquered and more about the potential realization that these things are here and then an internal implosion of our society. So I worry about my fellow human beings more than I worry about the aliens. So I guess in that sense, I disagree with Hawking's premise that they're out to get us. But sure, it's possible they're on a surveillance mission. But people have been reporting UFOs for at least 80 years, and that's a really, really long surveillance mission. And also, why would they want to conquer us? That's like us conquering ants.

Sean Illing

If some of these UFOs are the products of alien life, why haven't they made their presence more explicit? If they wanted to remain undetected, they could, and yet they continually expose themselves in these semi-clandestine ways. Why?

Alexander Wendt

That's a very good question. Because you're right, I think if they wanted to be completely secretive, they could. If they wanted to come out in the open, they could do that, too. My guess is that they have had a lot of experience with this in the past with civilizations at our stage. And they probably know that if they land on the White House lawn, there'll be chaos and social breakdown. People will start shooting at them.

So I think what they're doing is trying to get us used to the idea that they're here with the hopes that we'll figure it out ourselves, that we'll go beyond the taboo and do the science. And then maybe we can absorb the knowledge that we're not alone and our society won't implode when we finally do have contact. That's my theory, but who knows, right?

Sean Illing

It's an interesting theory, and as likely as any other, but Hawking's theory is every bit as plausible -

Alexander Wendt

That's right. But people have speculated that any civilization that's able to travel between the stars would have to become nonviolent, because they would never survive long enough if they're violent among themselves to actually reach a point where their technology was that sophisticated. And human beings don't seem to be as violent as we used to be, so there's that.

Sean Illing

I'd say our institutions have evolved and the incentives guiding our behavior have evolved, but I don't think we have. I think human beings are as nonviolent as their circumstances allow them to be.

Alexander Wendt

That's fair.

Sean Illing

If there's a non-zero chance that aliens are real and they know we're here, it's crazy that governments aren't more concerned about the dangers. We've all seen the same movies. How do you explain the apparent indifference here?

Alexander Wendt

For governments, there's no real upside to talking about this. They can't control this. If there are ETs, they don't have the power to do anything about it. They're helpless in the face of ETs. And there's a big downside risk of social chaos, loss of authority, loss of control and all that. So I think governments have lots of reasons to let a sleeping dog lie, which is why the Navy's thing is so surprising in a way.

Sean Illing

Maybe several governments already know of ETs and aren't revealing that knowledge for all the reasons you suggest.

Alexander Wendt

I'm a strong disbeliever in any kind of conspiracy argument. I don't think there has ever been a conspiracy to cover up the truth that we know that aliens are here. At most, we've covered up the fact that we have no idea what's going on.

"For governments, there's no real upside to talking about this. They can't control this."

Sean Illing

What's the argument or the piece of evidence that gives you the most pause? What makes you think there's nothing here?

Alexander Wendt

That's a good question. That I don't have a good answer shows my bias in a way. I guess I'd like to see more videos of the sort the Navy just released. It's likely they have other videos they haven't released. So I guess I would like to see more physical evidence. I suppose that's my answer: The thing that gives me the most pause is that we have so little evidence.

Sean Illing

You said a minute ago that we might be in a pre-contact situation in which ETs are gradually acclimating us to their presence. If that's true, what should we be doing to prepare for whatever comes next?

Alexander Wendt

Actually, that's the next article I would like to write. I don't know what the answer is right now. I only write articles where I don't know the answer ahead of time. But I guess I will say this: Montezuma could've prepared a lot better for Cortes than he did, had he only known Cortes was coming.
Support Vox's explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox's work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources - particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Pentagon recently released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy - one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show ... well, it's not exactly clear.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In December 2017, the news came out that officials at the nation's top public health agency were being prohibited from using a list of seven words in official documents being prepared for next year's budget. The forbidden words were "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based." This Orwellian piece of news reveals that words are not only important conveyers of ideas and concepts, but also a powerful mirror of the society that uses them. We use words to navigate expectations, to engage in interpersonal interaction, and to go along with or to speak out against social structures and systems. Therefore, the particular choice of words which we use (and do not use) reflects changes in cultural perspective, social composition, and political circumstances. Moreover, in a 2016 book titled "Words on the Move", Columbia scholar John Hamilton McWhorter wrote that "changes in meaning are as natural to words as changes of pitch are to music". In this salon, we will delve into the symphony of words that makes up our dictionary in order to better understand how we, as speakers, use words to inhabit and negotiate our many personal, cultural, and social identities and roles.

Some of the questions we strived to answer: Can words ever be neutral? In which ways do the words that we use to communicate reflect, affect and infect our reality? What about the words that we choose to omit? How does our personal patois - our vocabulary, syntax and linguistic quirks - function as a tool to legitimise, perpetuate and reinforce the status quo? And how can it be used to undermine it? If history is written by the winners, which words could compile a more thorough and comprehensive narration of history? If "to define is to limit", as Oscar Wilde famously said, can we do without definitions? Where should we draw the line between political correctness and self-censorship? If we are striving for accuracy, how can we balance the ambition to be as precise as possible, without drowning in a sea of qualifications? At which point does an assemblage of words become a language? Is the extinction of languages an inevitable phenomenon? Should we treat certain words as endangered species? Are emojis comparable to words? Do we really know what we are saying when we use them? Are they impoverishing our vocabulary; or are they expanding the potential of our communication outreach?
This salon took place on May 16th, 2018.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In December 2017, the news came out that officials at the nation's top public health agency were being prohibited from using a list of seven words in official documents being prepared for next year's budget. The forbidden words were "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
- WORDS // Matteo is a journalist and documentarist. He is the editor-in-chief of maize magazine at H-FARM, and co-director of the school of journalism at Università Cattolica in Milan. In an intimate account he shares reflections about this delicate moment that has also struck him personally on a physical and emotional level. He explains why he felt the need to gather his community around the Afterwords project and shares lessons learned from this crisis triggered by personal events. He reflects upon the sense and meaning of words and the importance of acknowledging micro moments, which compose the story of our lives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WORDS // Matteo is a journalist and documentarist. He is the editor-in-chief of maize magazine at H-FARM, and co-director of the school of journalism at Università Cattolica in Milan. In an intimate account he shares reflections about this delicate moment that has also struck him personally on a physical and emotional level.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If there's one thing you can say about Fortnite's live events, it's that they keep getting more ambitious. From the original rocket launch to the mech vs. kaiju battle to the black hole that wiped out an entire island, each new event is more elaborate than the last. Now we can say the same is true of the concerts. Last year's Marshmello show was an exciting, dynamic example of what a virtual concert could look like. This week's Travis Scott performance blew it out of the water.

Epic had been setting the stage for the concert since last weekend - literally. Over the last few days players could see a stage being constructed at the Sweaty Sands beach, and it grew more complete as the days passed. There was a black stage on top of the water, and multiple gold, inflatable Travis Scott heads around it.

As with past events, the pre-show was a bloodbath, with players killing each other to kill some time. (Thankfully, respawns were in place.) When the show started, players could see a strange planet-like object floating towards them on a circular screen; when it got close enough, everything blew up and the performance started properly.

Really, the entire Fortnite island was the stage. During the opening song a giant Scott stomped around the island, while players could run across the water to catch a glimpse. As the tracks changed, so did the visuals. At one point everything was fiery and Scott turned into a cyborg; later it looked like everyone had been transported to Tron. When "Highest in the Room" came on, the crowd was submerged underwater, along with a giant spaceman. There were rollercoasters and psychedelic effects and at the end players were literally flying around the planet.

The set was short, lasting around 15 minutes. But what I loved was that it was the kind of experience that could only exist in a virtual space like this. Yes, live concerts have become more elaborate, as anyone who has been to an IRL Travis Scott arena show can attest. But they don't let you float through the air while a Godzilla-sized rapper walks across an ocean.

Epic also appears to have learned some lessons from past events and concerts. For one, once the show started the game's UI was automatically turned off, letting you get a better view of the trippy visuals. The developer also limited the emotes players could use to keep things on brand. I couldn't do a kitty dance or anything silly; instead I could headbang or rage with a fiery microphone stand. In a nice touch, you didn't have to actually own those emotes to use them during the concert.

Perhaps the smartest thing Epic did was make this a tour instead of a concert. Whereas all previous Fortnite events were one-offs, the Scott concert I attended was the first of five. If you missed it, there are plenty of other chances to get in. (For more on how to watch, check out our guide.) It opens up the event to a larger audience around the world.

Last year's Marshmello concert was a huge success; more than 10 million people attended, according to Epic, making it Fortnite 's largest ever event. With multiple shows, a more elaborate performance, a bigger name performer, and a captive audience stuck inside with nothing to do, Travis Scott's virtual tour has the potential to top that. The question, really, is how much more surreal Epic can make its next digital concert series.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Travis Scott's first Fortnite concert was surreal and spectacular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If there's one thing you can say about Fortnite's live events, it's that they keep getting more ambitious. From the original rocket launch to the mech vs. kaiju battle to the black hole that wiped out an entire island, each new event is more elaborate than the last.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That's the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans online. While "Live" has become synonymous with performative streaming, these new apps instead spread the limelight across several users as well as the task, game, or discussion at hand.

The most buzzy of these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you. High-energy rooms attract crowds while slower ones see participants slip out to join other chat circles.

Clubhouse blew up this weekend on VC Twitter as people scrambled for exclusive invites, humblebragged about their membership, or made fun of everyone's FOMO. For now, there's no public app or access. The name Clubhouse perfectly captures how people long to be part of the in-crowd.

Clubhouse was built by Paul Davison, who previously founded serendipitous offline people-meeting location app Highlight and reveal-your-whole-camera-roll app Shorts before his team was acquired by Pinterest in 2016. This year he debuted his Alpha Exploration Co startup studio and launched Talkshow for instantly broadcasting radio-style call-in shows. Spontaneity is the thread that ties Davison's work together, whether its for making new friends, sharing your life, transmitting your thoughts, or having a discussion.

It's very early days for Clubhouse. It doesn't even have a website. Don't confuse it with the similarly named Clubhouse.io. There's no telling exactly what it will be like if or when it officially launches, and Davison and his co-founder Rohan Seth declined to comment. But the positive reception shows a desire for a more immediate, multi-media approach to discussion that updates what Twitter did with text.

Sheltered From Surprise

What quarantine has revealed is that when you separate everyone, spontaneity is a big thing you miss. In your office, that could be having a random watercooler chat with a co-worker or commenting aloud about something funny you found on the internet. At a party, it could be wandering up to chat with group of people because you know one of them or overhear something interesting. That's lacking while we're stuck home since we've stigmatized randomly phoning a friend, differing to asynchronous text despite its lack of urgency.

Scheduled Zoom calls, utilitarian Slack threads, and endless email chains don't capture the thrill of surprise or the joy of conversation that giddily revs up as people riff off each other's ideas. But smart app developers are also realizing that spontaneity doesn't mean constantly interrupting people's life or workflow. They give people the power to decide when they are or aren't available or signal that they're not to be disturbed so they're only thrust into social connection when they want it.

Houseparty embodies this spontaneity. It's become the breakout hit of quarantine by letting people on a whim join group video chat rooms with friends the second they open the app. It saw 50 million downloads in a month, up 70X over its pre-COVID levels in some places. It's become the #1 social app in 82 countries including the US, and #1 overall in 16 countries.

Originally built for gaming, Discord lets communities spontaneously connect through persistent video, voice, and chat rooms. It's seen a 50% increase in US daily voice users with spikes in shelter-in-place early adopter states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington. Bunch, for video chat overlayed on mobile gaming, is also climbing the charts and going mainstream with its user base shifting to become majority female as they talk for 1.5 million minutes per day. Both apps make it easy to join up with pals and pick something to play together.

The Impromptu Office

Enterprise video chat tools are adapting to spontaneity as an alternative to heavy-handed, pre-meditated Zoom calls. There's been a backlash as people realize they don't get anything done by scheduling back-to-back video chats all day.

Loom lets you quickly record and send a video clip to co-workers that they can watch at their leisure, with back-and-forth conversation sped up because videos are uploaded as they're shot.

Around overlays small circular video windows atop your screen so you can instantly communicate with colleagues while most of your desktop stays focused on your actual work.

Screen exists as a tiny widget that can launch a collaborative screenshare where everyone gets a cursor to control the shared window so they can improvisationally code, design, write, and annotate.

Pragli is an avatar-based virtual office where you can see if someone's in a calendar meeting, away, or in flow listening to music so you know when to instantly open a voice or video chat channel together without having to purposefully find a time everyone's free. But instead of following you home like Slack, Pragli lets you sign in and out of the virtual office to start and end your day.

Raising Our Voice

While visual communication has been the breakout feature of our mobile phones by allowing us to show where we are, shelter-in-place means we don't have much to show. That's expanded the opportunity for tools that take a less-is-more approach to spontaneous communication. Whether for remote partying or rapid problem solving, new apps beyond Clubhouse are incorporating voice rather than just video. Voice offers a way to rapidly exchange information and feel present together without dominating our workspace or attention, or forcing people into an uncomfortable spotlight.

High Fidelity is Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale's $72 million-funded current startup. After recently pivoting away from building a virtual reality co-working tool, High Fidelity has begun testing a voice and headphones-based online event platform and gathering place. The early beta lets users move their dot around a map and hear the voice of anyone close to them with spatial audio so voices get louder as you get closer to someone, and shift between your ears as you move past them. You can spontaneously approach and depart little clusters of dots to explore different conversations within earshot.

High Fidelity is currently using a satellite photo of Burning Man as its test map. It allows DJs to set up in different corners, and listeners to stroll between them or walk off with a friend to chat, similar to the real offline event. Since Burning Man was cancelled this year, High Fidelity could potentially be a candidate for holding the scheduled virtual version the organizers have promised.

Houseparty's former CEO Ben Rubin and Skype GM of engineering Brian Meek are building a spontaneous teamwork tool called Slashtalk. While Rubin left, Houseparty sold to Fortnite-maker Epic in mid-2019, but the gaming giant largely neglected the app until its recent quarantine-driven success.

His new startup's site explains that "/talk is an anti-meeting tool for fast, decentralized conversations. We believe most meetings can be eliminated if the right people are connected at the right time to discuss the right topics, for just as long as necessary." It lets people quickly jump into a voice or video chat to get something sorted without delaying until a calendared collab session.

Whether for work or play, these spontaneous apps can conjure times from our more unstructured youth. Whether sifting through the cafeteria or school yard, seeing who else is at the mall, walking through halls of open doors in college dorms, or hanging at the student union or campus square, the pre-adult years offer many opportunities for impromptu social interation.

As we age and move into our separate homes, we literally erect walls that limit our ability to perceive the social cues that signal that someone's available for unprompted communication. That's spawned apps like Down To Lunch and Snapchat acquisition Zenly, and Facebook's upcoming Messenger status feature designed to break through those barriers and make it feel less desperate to ask someone to hang out offline.

But while socializing or collaborating IRL requires transportation logistics and usually a plan, the new social apps discussed here bring us together instantly, thereby eliminating the need to schedule togetherness ahead of time. Gone too are the geographic limits restraining you to connect only with those within a reasonable commute. Digitally, you can pick from your whole network. And quarantines have further opened our options by emptying parts of our calendars.

Absent those frictions, what shines through is our intention. We can connect with who we want and accomplish what we want. Spontaneous apps open the channel so our impulsive human nature can shine through.
For more of this author Josh Constine's product analysis, subscribe to his newsletter Moving Product

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Clubhouse voice chat leads a wave of spontaneous social apps

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That's the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An office noise generator - providing you with the soothing tones of modern office life to help you focus when working from home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the past few weeks, we've been providing resources for artists to keep the music going, but with the financial repercussions of canceled shows and listeners asking how they can support the artists they love - we knew there was more we could do.

So we've created a simple button for your profile where fans can instantly and directly show their support. All you have to do is choose where you want to send followers, give them a little context on what they're supporting, and then let the world know by sharing on your socials. Here's how it works:

Click the "Edit" button on the top right side of your profile page on web

In the "Edit your Profile" pop-up, click "Add support link" to add a link to financial exchanges or online stores like Kickstarter, Bandcamp, Patreon, PayPal and more (full list of supported platforms can be accessed here - SoundCloud never takes a cut)

Hit "Save changes" to generate a Support button on your profile that's visible above your stats and on your track pages

Use your bio to let fans know what they're supporting - whether it's your rent for the month or the album you dropped this week

Promote on socials so your day-ones know there's a way to help you beyond playing your tracks on repeat

We've built this feature to help creators impacted by the COVID-19 virus and will keep it active as long as we're all in this so you can fund your projects, offset bills, or get whatever you need to stay on your feet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Add this new button to your profile so fans can financially support you 💸

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over the past few weeks, we've been providing resources for artists to keep the music going, but with the financial repercussions of canceled shows and listeners asking how they can support the artists they love - we knew there was more we could do.

# data[].attributes.body
#futureberry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are tracking meaningful COVID-related innovations from around the world. Our database contains 1,000+ innovations. Segmented by industry. Use it, share it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day. Workers feed the heavy linens into hot, automated presses to iron out wrinkles, and load dirty laundry into washers and dryers large enough to sit in. It's loud, difficult work, but bearable. The workers were protected by union contracts that guaranteed a living wage and affordable healthcare, and many had worked decades at the company. They were mostly happy to work for Disney.

This changed in 2008. The union contracts were up, and Disney wouldn't renew without adjustments. One of the changes involved how management tracked worker productivity. Before, employees would track how many sheets or towels or comforters the workers washed, dried or folded on paper notes turned in at the end of the day. But Disney was replacing that system with an electronic tracking system that monitored their progress in real time.

Electronic monitoring wasn't unusual in the hotel business. But Disney took the highly unusual step of displaying the productivity of their workers on scoreboards all over the laundry facilities, says Austin Lynch, director of organising for Unite Here Local 11. According to Lynch, every worker's name was compared with the names of coworkers, each one colour-coded like traffic signals. If you were keeping up with the goals of management, your name was displayed in green. If you slowed down, your name was in yellow. If you were behind, your name was in red. Managers could see the monitors from their office, and change production targets from their computers. Each laundry machine would also monitor the rate of worker input, and flash red and yellow lights at the workers directly if they slowed down.

'They had a hard time ignoring it,' said Beatriz Topete, a union organiser for Unite Here Local 11 at the time. 'It pushes you mentally to keep working. It doesn't give you breathing space.' Topete recalled an incident where she was speaking to workers on the night shift, feeding hand-towels into a laundry machine. Every time the workers slowed down, the machine would flash at them. They told her they felt like they couldn't stop.

The workers called this 'the electronic whip'.

While this whip was cracking, the workers sped up. 'We saw a higher incidence of injuries,' Topete said. 'Several people were injured on the job.' The formerly collegial environment degenerated into a race. The laundry workers competed with each other, and got upset when coworkers couldn't keep up. People started skipping bathroom breaks. Pregnant workers fell behind. 'The scoreboard incentivises competition,' said Topete. 'Our human competitiveness, whatever makes us like games, whatever keeps us wanting to win, it's a similar thing that was happening. Even if you didn't want to.'

The electronic whip is an example of gamification gone awry.

Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It's premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. 'We are starving and games are feeding us,' writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). 'What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what's wrong with reality?'

Consequentially, gamification is everywhere. It's in coupon-dispensing loyalty programmes at supermarkets. Big Y, my local supermarket chain in Boston, employs digital slot machines at the checkout for its members. Winning dispenses 'coins' that can be redeemed for deals. Gamification is in the driver interfaces of Lyft and Uber, which give badges for miles driven. Gamification is the premise of fitness games such as Zombies, Run!, where users push themselves to exercise by outrunning digital zombies, and of language-learning apps such as Duolingo, where scoring prompts one to master more. The playground offices of Silicon Valley, complete with slides and ball pits, have been gamified. Your credit score is one big game, too.

But gamification's trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play - and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.

Games are probably as old as the human species itself. Archaeologists have unearthed -like boards made of stone in Jordan, dated to 6000 BCE. The application of games to serious matters has probably been with us almost as long. The Egyptian board game senet represented the passage of the ka (or vital spark) to the afterlife; its name is commonly translated as 'the game of passing'. The Roman senatorial class played latrunculi, an abstract game of military strategy to train the mind and pass the time. Dice-based games of chance are thought to have originated with ancient divination practices involving thrown knucklebones. Native American ball games served as proxies of war and were probably crucial to keeping the Iroquois Confederation together. As many as 1,000 players would converge to play what the Mohawk game called baaga'adowe (the little brother of war).

The conflation of game and ritual is likely by design. The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga observed in Homo Ludens (1938) that both invoke a magic circle, a time and place outside of the norms of reality. During play, as during ritual, new rules supersede the old. Players are not tried as thieves for 'stealing' a base in baseball. The Eucharist doesn't literally become flesh during Catholic transubstantiation rituals. Through play and games, Egyptians could metaphorically engage with the afterlife without the inconvenience of dying.

An important aspect of early games was that they were still limited in size and scope. One-thousand-player stickball games between whole villages were a rarity. We don't see the emergence of anything analogous to modern gamification until the 18th century when Europe underwent a renaissance of games and game design. In 18th-century Paris, Rome, Vienna and London, an international leisure class emerged that communicated across national and linguistic divides through the medium of games. For example, one of the earliest four-person card games in Europe was ombre - from el hombre (the man) - which originated in 16th-century Spain. The game didn't become known outside Spain until almost the end of the 17th century, with the marriage of Maria Theresa of Spain to Louis XIV of France. Within a few years, the game spread across the continent and was playable in the courts and salons of every capital in Europe.

The spread of ombre coincided with a boom in games and game culture in Europe. Abraham and David Roentgen became a father-and-son pair of rockstars for building foldable game-tables that could be rearranged to suit everything from backgammon to ombre. Play rooms appeared in the homes of the aristocracy and emergent bourgeois. Books of rules such as Pleasant Pastime with Enchanting and Joyful Games to Be Played in Society (1757) were translated into multiple languages. The Catholic Church got in on the act with the liberalisation of lottery laws by popes Clement XII and Pius VI. In the 1750s, the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli even declared: 'The century that we live in could be subsumed in the history books as ... the Century of Play.'

The use of immersive game mechanics was promoted as a way of 'hacking happiness'

In the mid-18th century, Gerhard Tersteegen, an enterprising priest, developed the 'Pious Lottery', a deck of 365 cards with various tasks of faith. 'You'd read a prayer straight from the card,' explains the historian Mathias Fuchs of Leuphana University in Germany. It is reminiscent of modern mindfulness or religious apps that attempt to algorithmically generate spiritual fulfilment.

Soon, 18th-century musicians were incorporating the logic of game design into their music through randomised card- or dice-based systems for musical composition. Johann Sebastian Bach's student Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, both wrote musical composition games - respectively, 'The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer' and 'A Method for Making Six Bars of Double Counterpoint at the Octave Without Knowing the Rules' ( Musikalisches Würfelspiel), which was also attributed to Mozart. These games asked erstwhile composers to roll a pair of dice to randomly select pre-written measures for minuets. According to one estimate, Mozart's game features 1.3 x 10 ²⁹ possible combinations. Players would stitch measures of music together in the order rolled to compose a final product, in essence enacting an algorithm. In a way, these resemble modern musical rhythm games such as Guitar Hero that provide the illusion of musical mastery for the sake of entertainment.

It's not clear what ended the century of play. Perhaps the rococo play culture of the 18th century ended with the wars and nationalistic fervour of the 19th. Fuchs suggests the French Revolution of 1789 as the likely cause. What's clear is that the centrality of games as a cultural force wouldn't reach 18th-century levels of saturation until the development of computers.

By the end of the 20th century, video and then computers became more ubiquitous and user-friendly, and digital games rose in scale and scope. To make computers more accessible, human-computer interface designers borrowed elements from early video games. Graphical user interfaces replaced code. Games and gamers became distinct subsets of the computer software and computer hobbyist landscapes. Because the first computer games were experiments in software design, computer and hobby magazines regularly printed and distributed lines of code. Programs, including games, were freely available to remix and experiment on. Importantly, this hobbyist culture, while not a utopia of gender equality, was not strictly male-coded initially.

As software development became more corporate, and the user experience more centralised, the discourse shifted away from the quality of the software to gameplay and user experience. Game development corporations seized on a booming market, cultivating gamers as a distinct category of consumer, and focusing on white, adolescent and teenage boys. Jennifer deWinter, a video-game scholar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, refers to this as the construction of technomasculinity. 'It takes over the ideology of what it takes to be a successful man ... the gamer identity was constructed for them to consume as white, male and tech-savvy,' she explains. The workers of the future would be gamers.

By 2008, the gamification of work felt absolutely natural to a generation of people raised on ubiquitous digital technology and computer games. Tech startups were faced with the challenge of attracting and retaining users. Game designers and marketers including Jane McGonigal and Ethan Zuckerman promoted the use of immersive game mechanics as a way of 'hacking happiness' and building user engagement at summits, speeches and TED talks. By 2010, interest in gamification intensified with the success of the social network game FarmVille, which seemed to have solved the problem of user retention and engagement. Marketers and consultants were quick to seize on gamification as a tool to create customer loyalty and manage human desire. They sought to capitalise on the 'addictive fun' of gambling and games by introducing 'pseudo-goals' unrelated to the primary goals of either the consumer or the business in question. Game design elements such as badges, points, scoreboards and progress-tracking proliferated across different platforms, apps and workspaces. In doing so, they unknowingly borrowed from the Pious Lottery. Saying a Hail Mary or going to church because of a game isn't necessarily aligned with the goal of eternal salvation, in much the same way as buying blood oranges for loyalty points isn't really the goal of grocery shopping.

This brings us back to the electronic whip; Disney was hardly alone. The US retail giant Target implemented the Checkout Game which tracked and scored the speed of minimum-wage checkout clerks. The clerks could see themselves scored in real time on their point-of-sale computers. The US ice-cream parlour chain Cold Stone Creamery marshalled the power of games to teach workers how to be expert ice-cream mixers with the game Stone City, which uses motion controls to teach people how to 'feel' out the correct scoops. The game calculates how large the scoops are in relation to the optimal sizes, and then tells the players how much their over-scoops cost the store. Workers were asked to download the game and play it in their off-hours.

Amazon has also bought big into gamifying work. Warehouse workers are subject to scoreboards that display the silhouettes of workers who were caught stealing, what they were caught stealing, and how they were caught. Their productivity is monitored by handheld devices that scan and locate products. If their productivity drops, workers are disciplined with points on a scorecard. As in golf, more points is bad. Accrue enough points, and the worker is fired. White-collar workers too are scored and ranked by digital metrics, and by their peers and bosses. Until 2016, the bottom scorers were fired in what's called 'rank and yank' by the employees.

Through gamified technology, corporations such as Amazon and Disney now have an unprecedented level of control over the individual bodies of their employees. Steve Sims, a vice-president at the gamification firm Badgeville, now CallidusCloud, in California said: 'We like to think of it as behaviour management.' In other words, how to get other people to do more stuff, more often.

Managers don't need to follow workers with stopwatches. It's micromanagement with unprecedented granularity

This kind of micromanagement resembles Taylorism, a system developed by the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor during the 1890s to codify the movements and habits of mind that led to productivity. To eliminate inefficiency and waste, Taylor followed around the 'most productive' factory workers, recording the timing of all their movements with a stopwatch. He set managers, similarly armed with stopwatches, to micromanage every detail of a job. Taylor was also famous for fudging his numbers in favour of speed-driving workers to exhaustion and, in some cases, to strike.

But the modern gamified workplace enables control beyond Taylor's wildest dreams. Games are sets of rules prescribing both actions and outcomes. A gamified workplace sets not just goals for workers but precisely how those goals can be achieved. Managers don't need to follow workers with stopwatches. They can use smartphones or apps. It's micromanagement with unprecedented granularity. 'This is Taylorism 2.0,' according to the media expert Steven Conway of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. 'Activities are more rigidly defined and processed than ever.' The gamified workplace is not a game in the original sense, nor does it cultivate playful ends.

The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill - that's a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. 'Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,' he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. 'The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,' he notes. 'Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.'

The problem isn't limited to work. Social platforms all employ some form of gamification in their stats, figures, points, likes and badges. Dating apps gamify our romantic life; Facebook gamifies friendship.

Even war has been gamified: drone pilots operate in a highly gamified environment. Foeke Postma, a researcher and programme officer at the Dutch peace organization PAX, says that drone warfare often takes the shape of a game, right down to the joysticks or PlayStation-like controllers that the pilots use. 'The US Airforce and the Royal Air Force have specifically targeted gamers to recruit as drone operators,' he explains. The US drone program also employs game-like terminology when discussing targets. High-value assassination targets are called 'jackpots'. Anyone caught near a jackpot during an airstrike is called 'bugsplatter'. When drone pilots retire or transfer, they're given a scorecard of kills. Postma says that this framework risks the total dehumanisation of the targets of drone warfare. In an interview with The Guardian, a drone pilot said: 'Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?'

Mistaking games for reality is ultimately mistaking map for territory

The expansion of game-like elements into nongame spaces is a global phenomenon. We are all living in expanding, overlapping magic circles, with some places moving faster than others. China is introducing a national gamified social credit score called Sesame Credit. Your ranking is based on how well you repay loans, the scores of your friends, where you shop, and what you post to social media, and this ranking determines whether you can receive loans. In the US, the more limited FICO score can determine whether you get an apartment, a car, or a job.

The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault would have said that these are technologies of power. Today, the interface designer and game scholar Sebastian Deterding says that this kind of gamification expresses a modernist view of a world with top-down managerial control. But the concept is flawed. Gamification promises easy, centralised overviews and control. 'It's a comforting illusion because de facto reality is not as predictable as a simulation,' Deterding says. You can make a model of a city in SimCity that bears little resemblance to a real city. Mistaking games for reality is ultimately mistaking map for territory. No matter how well-designed, a simulation cannot account for the unforeseen.

A prime example of gamification gone awry is Go365, a health app introduced in 2017 by the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA) in West Virginia and the Humana health insurance company. The app was presented as a motivating tool and game, not unlike smartphone fitness apps. Go365's advertisements featured white, upper-middle-class joggers and attractively dishevelled soccer moms buying carrots. The app tracked physical activity, steps and location. It also allowed users to give more sensitive information to Humana, such as blood glucose levels, sleep cycle, diet and the results of doctor's visits. Users were asked how often they drank and whether they smoked. Family medical histories were probed. The app awarded points, sets milestones and gave rewards for participation in the form of 'Bucks' that could be redeemed for gift cards. The agency claimed that the app was voluntary, but failure to accrue enough points (and to increase points annually) meant an extra $500 in premiums and an additional $1,000 on top of existing deductibles. That might not sound like a lot, but most teachers and support staff in West Virginia make less than $40,000 a year. Many have second jobs. Many more are elderly or have chronic illnesses.

The legislature gave no option but to play Go365 - but how teachers were supposed to play was another matter. 'It was the cherry on top of a shit sundae,' said Michael Mochaidean, a teacher and organiser in West Virginia. The teachers didn't want to give up sensitive medical data. They didn't want their locations tracked. After years of funding cuts to the PEIA, they saw the app as a way to kick teachers off their healthcare altogether.

Enraged, the teachers of West Virginia took to Facebook. They complained, they organised, and in March of 2018 thousands of them descended on the capitol in Charleston in a wildcat strike. After years of low pay and slashed benefits, their dissatisfaction had finally crystallised around the imposition of Go365. They would not participate in the game. By the end of the strike, the teachers had won a pay raise, and forced West Virginia to end its contract with Humana. Go365 was phased out. The teachers had sent a message to their bosses. Neither their work nor their health was a game.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How employers have gamified work for maximum profit - Vincent Gabrielle | Aeon Essays

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day. Workers feed the heavy linens into hot, automated presses to iron out wrinkles, and load dirty laundry into washers and dryers large enough to sit in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A couple of months ago, Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist specialised in interactive media, dedicated a long post on his blog to the concept of the metaverse, examining its nature, where it can be found and who its constructor will be. Drawing on science-fiction for answers, the metaverse can be defined as a virtual space within which an effective reality can exist.

If on reading this definition, films such as Matrix or Ready Player One, come to mind, then your brain has made the right connections. If these initial thoughts were immediately followed by the memory of the last time you connected to Second Life, then no further explanation is required.

In Matthew Ball's vision of the internet of the future, the metaverse plays a central role. He claims that it is around this concept that interfaces will be constructed, allowing us to interact with each other in the coming future. If you think this is just a simple exercise in speculation or the fantasies of a nostalgist trying to defend protocols that technological development appears to have declared dead and buried ( Second Life, again), perhaps you should take a closer look at the development of "videogames" such as Fortnite and Minecraft.

The latter is particularly interesting, because it has been chosen by Reporter sans Frontiers as the location for a project launched on 12 March on the occasion of the World Day Against Cyber Censorship. The project is called The Uncensored Library. It is a mammoth digital architectural work created by the Block Works collective, a library built in the neo-classical style of grand national institutes, which exists exclusively on a Minecraft server, and which contains 5 areas, each dedicated to a country where censorship has real and tangible consequences.

Each area is dedicated to a journalist - Jamal Khashoggi for Saudi Arabia, Yulia Berezovskaia for Russia, Nguyen Van Dai for Vietnam, Javier Valdez for Mexico and the portal Mada Masr for Egypt. The library contains over 200 books containing more than 200 posts and articles censored in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Vietnam, Mexico and Egypt. These are countries that censor the press, but which guarantee access to Minecraft, thanks to which this information has a new channel through which to reach people deprived of free and courageous voices that allow them to properly examine the reality that surrounds them.

This is a taste of the power of the metaverse. It is a reality that seems to have the strength to open a new stage for the creative and productive skills that characterised the explosion of the web 2.0, and which now appear fully absorbed by the capitalist dynamics of the platforms. It is still to be seen when and how the governments will react when they realise that Minecraft and the metaverse are not simply idle pastimes for teenagers, but rather extremely relevant geopolitical matters. It would be wise to learn from the errors of the past, and make sure we are ready for when that moment comes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The library inside Minecraft and our future in the Metaverse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A couple of months ago, Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist specialised in interactive media, dedicated a long post on his blog to the concept of the metaverse, examining its nature, where it can be found and who its constructor will be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chinese gaming and social giant Tencent has rolled out "Fen Fu," an embedded credit feature which allows its 1.1 billion WeChat users to "buy now and pay later."

Why it matters: Fenfu is Tencent's foray into microloans, a service which Alipay offers users with its Huabei feature, and JD.com with its Baitiao product.

This rollout shows Tencent's strategy in building a digital ecosystem in which users have easy access to financial services within the WeChat app itself.

In recent months, Meituan and Alipay have set out their long-term strategy of providing comprehensive digital lifestyle services, fully integrated into their existing apps.

Tencent's gains in fintech show that the competition to serve all user needs will only heat up.

Details: Announced last year, large numbers of users had access to the Fen Fu function as of last week (in Chinese)

Users can rely on Fen Fu to pay for eating out, shopping, and watching movies but cannot use it to send payments to other WeChat users.

When paying, users do not have to withdraw credit in advance. They can directly select Fen Fu as an option when paying.

Users will pay a daily interest on money borrowed and can repay the full amount at any time.

Fen Fu has no fixed interest rates nor payment due dates-differing from other installment payment products.

Instead, interest rates drop whenever money is paid back.

Context: In Q4, Tencent reported fintech and business service revenue of RMB 29.9 billion (around $4.2 billion), growth of 39% year on year, accounting for 28% of total revenues for the quarter.

WeChat Pay rival Alipay has been expanding its cross-border partnerships and broadening its financial services ecosystem in collaboration with other user-rich platforms.

Microlending took off in 2016, and is particularly popular among China's younger consumers: more than half (in Chinese) borrow money to finance their daily consumption.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tencent launches 'buy now, pay later' credit feature in WeChat · TechNode

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chinese gaming and social giant Tencent has rolled out "Fen Fu," an embedded credit feature which allows its 1.1 billion WeChat users to "buy now and pay later." Why it matters: Fenfu is Tencent's foray into microloans, a service which Alipay offers users with its Huabei feature, and JD.com with its Baitiao product.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a time of crisis, Finland is calling in the cavalry: social media influencers.

Helsinki has classified social media influencers as critical actors to society during a crisis, along with doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers. Finland says it is the only country in the world that has defined social media as a critical operator.

The role of influencers during a crisis is to disseminate information on social media.

"We are aware that government communication doesn't reach everyone. Before this was possible through traditional media like television, but today especially young people get their news through social media," said Aapo Riihimäki, a communications specialist at the Finnish prime minister's office.

The drive is a collaboration between the Finnish government, the country's national emergency supply agency and PING Helsinki, a social media influencer consultancy. Though nobody could predict the coronavirus pandemic, Finland has been preparing for a crisis of its magnitude for decades. The country's national emergency supply agency joins forces with the public sector and industry to secure the country's key functions during a national emergency.

"If we can get a high school student with around 1,000 followers to share information, that is valuable too" - Inna-Pirjetta Lahti, CEO of PING Helsinki

PING Helsinki edits the government's messages into a social media-friendly format, and sends it to its networks of some 1,500 influencers. Influencers are free to use the messages and images as they want.

"This is an honor," said Inari Fernández, a professional social media influencer with a monthly YouTube audience of 100,000 viewers and 34,000 Instagram followers.

Fernández posts the government's coronavirus guidance in her Instagram Stories several times a week, slotted in between her usual content on life in Lapland and family life raising two kids. Instagram Stories allow users to post pictures and videos that stay visible for 24 hours.

Influencers participate voluntarily and do not get paid. "I would refuse a fee. This is our duty as citizens," Fernández continued.

Fernández was one of the first influencers to join the drive just days after Finland went into lockdown in mid-March.

The influencers' quick mobilization was possible because they have been part of Finland's emergency contingency plans for nearly two years. Social media influencers were added to the pool of essential actors a year and a half ago, after the media section of the national emergency supply organization realized traditional media would not be enough to reach the whole nation in a crisis.

Finnish people have high levels of trust in the media, and the country's press is one the world's freest. But despite that, the country is not immune to the fragmenting news landscape.

"Some people trust social media influencers more than the media," said Tero Koskinen, the head of preparedness for the media section of the Finnish national emergency supply organization.

Koskinen said the goal of the collaboration is to find procedures that help social media influencers to communicate fact-based information.

Finland's small population, 5.5 million, might also help get the message across. "In the U.S., you have to go through management and there's a lot of bureaucracy. In a small country like Finland, you can be very influential in your genre with 5,000 or 10,000 followers," Fernández said.

Anyone who feels they are an influencer is welcome to join the network.

"If we can get a high school student with around 1,000 followers to share information, that is valuable too. They might have more engagement and influence in their own social circles than someone with more followers," said Inna-Pirjetta Lahti, the CEO of PING Helsinki.

As the collaboration develops, Lahti sees a lot of room for experimentation. Could the world see a TikTok video with Prime Minister Sanna Marin?

"I wouldn't shut it out as an option. Our government and civil servants have understood that social media is an important and valuable way to communicate. They are ready to try new things," Lahti said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Finland taps social media influencers during coronavirus crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a time of crisis, Finland is calling in the cavalry: social media influencers. Helsinki has classified social media influencers as critical actors to society during a crisis, along with doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers. Finland says it is the only country in the world that has defined social media as a critical operator.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
At the other end of the spectrum it was:
👋 Early signs of a surge in teams created and new paid customers unlike anything we had ever seen.

Weighed against:
✋ We had 110,000 customers. In the worst case scenarios many thousands of those would go out of business.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) March 26, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
At the other end of the spectrum it was:
👋 Early signs of a surge in teams created and new paid customers unlike anything we had ever seen.

Weighed against:
✋ We had 110,000 customers. In the worst case scenarios many thousands of those would go out of business.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
When I think about the future, I imagine a “cone of possibilities.” The further out you get, the harder it is to predict and the wider the cone gets. Increased risk, volatility, uncertainty push it wider still. Our job in this moment is to help others predict our future. Hmm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
At the other end of the spectrum it was:
👋 Early signs of a surge in teams created and new paid customers unlike anything we had ever seen.

Weighed against:
✋ We had 110,000 customers. In the worst case scenarios many thousands of those would go out of business.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Business 30 Marzo, 2020 @ 2:34

di Forbes.it

Staff

La redazione di Forbes.Leggi di più dell'autore

Sta succedendo in Germania, ma chissà se questo modello di cooperazione troverà attuazione anche nel nostro Paese. Si tratta di una partnership importante, quella siglata tra Aldi, la multinazionale tedesca della grande distribuzione organizzata, e McDonald's Germany: " I dipendenti McDonald's che sono stati colpiti dalla chiusura del proprio ristorante o stanno lavorando in maniera limitata - recita il comunicato stampa ufficiale - a causa della crisi indotta dal coronavirus e che vogliono ancora rendere disponibile la propria capacità lavorativa possono ora essere impiegati nelle filiali Aldi in Germania (sia Aldi North che Aldi South, i due rami in cui negli anni '60 è stata divisa la società per via di una divergenza tra i due fratelli fondatori, ndr) senza dover seguire alcun iter burocratico particolare ". Al personale McDonald's verranno applicate le condizioni standard di Aldi e, una volta rientrata l'emergenza, ritornerà a compiere regolarmente la propria attività nei punti vendita della catena di fast-food.

"Attualmente in Germania viene chiesto a tutti di fare la propria parte per far fronte alla crisi. Con questa soluzione possiamo farlo e allo stesso tempo offrire una classica situazione vantaggiosa per tutti: i nostri dipendenti possono, se lo desiderano, continuare a essere impiegati. Allo stesso tempo, Aldi potrà beneficiare di risorse aggiuntive garantendo di poter lavorare a pieno anche durante la crisi", ha dichiarato Holger Beeck, Ceo di McDonald's Germany.

Un'alleanza davvero strategica in questo momento di emergenza nel quale i fast-food, come molte attività di ristorazione, si trovano a dover ridurre drasticamente la propria attività, mentre il personale in forza alla grande distribuzione è oberato da un eccessivo carico di lavoro e stress per via dell'affollamento che si registra all'interno dei supermercati.

Nicolás de Lope, portavoce del consiglio di amministrazione di Aldi North, ha dichiarato: "T empi speciali richiedono soluzioni speciali. Questa forma di cooperazione è stata finora unica per Aldi. Siamo convinti di poter superare questa crisi con soluzioni non convenzionali e una forte coesione".

Vuoi ricevere le notizie di Forbes direttamente nel tuo Inbox? Iscriviti alla nostra newsletter!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
McDonald's "presta" i suoi dipendenti alla grande distribuzione di Aldi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Business 30 Marzo, 2020 @ 2:34 di Forbes.it Staff La redazione di Forbes.Leggi di più dell'autore Sta succedendo in Germania, ma chissà se questo modello di cooperazione troverà attuazione anche nel nostro Paese.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My wife and I are locked down with our two teens in a partially renovated house that has several walls missing and no doors on the bedrooms. The bathroom, however, does have walls and a door. The kids think the yoga mat in the bathroom is for yoga. It's not.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
download file
Versione in Italiano su Minima e Moralia
English version on NERO Editions
Poi su Archphoto
Video per OttN art project
Norsk versjon
Poi su Come Don Chisciotte
Versione cartacea in italiano su Espoarte .109 (2020).
Poi su Arianna Editrice
Intervista su Contro Radio
Una selezione del testo scelta per la mostra Pensiero Magico di Giorgio Galotti
THE RISE OF CONTEMPORARY POST-HUMANS / Maize HFarm
Fall Semester
Leonardo Caffo, Dopo il Covid-19 Punti per una discussione, Nottetempo, Milano 2020, ISBN 978-88-7452-839-4 [edizione ampliata e riveduta poi diventata libro]
To μανιφέστο του COVID-19. (Σημειώσεις για ένα μετά που θα μπορούσε να είναι πριν). Του Leonardo Caffo

alcune reazioni

Collaborare è unica cosa che conta di Mattia Battagion su medium

Appunti per un dopo che era un prima

Leonardo Caffo

Nel 2017 pubblicavo Fragile Umanità (Einaudi) in cui sostenevo che l'umanità fosse arrivata al collasso è che la nostra nicchia ecologica, la nostra vita "normale", sarebbe ceduta sotto il peso di una epidemia, di un problema ambientale, di una cattiva gestione generale delle risorse. La fragilità di Homo Sapiens andava a intendersi in due modi: (1) concettuale / non sappiamo cosa sia davvero "umanità", dove inizi e termini l'estensione di questo concetto, non capiamo quale sia il modello migliore per esseri umani (ad esempio: gli Yanomami che problemi potranno avere dal Covid-19? Non è per loro una risorsa?); (2) oggettuale/ non sappiamo quando l'umanità cederà avendo interpretato il progresso come una continua forzatura dei limiti e delle risorse sue e del pianeta.

La società umana maggioritaria, avendo ignorato il tema della fragilità, si trova ora a combattere contro un virus: una battaglia che si perderà se si aggirà solo contro gli effetti (virus) e non contro le cause (le condizioni di possibilità del virus). Questo tipo di società potrà sopravvivere, magari trovando nel giro di qualche mese un vaccino a richiamo periodico o cambiando radicalmente le regole della socialità per esempio con quarantene periodiche, oppure crollare definitivamente: l'ovvietà è che sopravvivere o crollare sono due movimenti molto simili allo stato attuale delle cose. Se sopravvive adesso, crollerà alla prossima epidemia o crisi ecologica, se crolla subito potrà invece intavolare immediatamente un nuovo paradigma di costruzione della convivenza tra Homo Sapiens e il pianeta.

Le idee sul progresso considerate ovvie fino a qualche tempo fa sono state un errore fatale per la specie umana. Le filosofie e tecnologie di matrice progressista convinte che avremmo vissuto per sempre, reso il pianeta un ammasso di tecnologie, urbanizzato il mondo aggiustando semplicemente il tiro delle emissioni di co2 o delle borracce contro la plastica, hanno in realtà destabilizzato definitivamente la possibilità di una vita degna per Homo Sapiens nel pianeta. Si fa in questi giorni un uso ricorrente dell'espressione "tornare al mondo normale" come se ciò che vivevamo prima del Covid-19 fosse davvero normale: disgregazione sociale, povertà, sfruttamento animale, distruzione dell'ambiente, danni sempre maggiori al pianeta e alle cose della natura, potevano forse apparire normali alla sparuta fetta di umanità occidentale convinta che gli ultimi cinquant'anni di benessere diffuso fossero la norma mentre invece erano l'alterazione che si reggeva su guerre altrui, carestie, sfruttamento dei paesi sottosviluppati, eliminazionebrutale della diversità.

L'incondizionato sviluppo della globalizzazione e delle tecnologie hanno inflitto danni irreparabili al tessuto del reale causando, e abbiamo infiniti nomi per descrivere questo stato di cose da Antropocene a Capitalocene, un lunghissimo periodo di aggiustamento doloroso del danno. Noi siamo all'alba di questo lunghissimo periodo doloroso.

Abbiamo tutti contribuito, nelle diverse posizioni di potere che abbiamo ricoperto, a ridurre ogni organismo vivente (forma di vita) a oggetti di consumo. Gli animali e la biodiversità sono diventati cibo, la scienza ne ha fatto come vediamo oggi un inutile corpo per la sperimentazione di farmaci e vaccini, la natura è stata usata come un elemento esterno dal nostro e ci stupiamo oggi che un pipistrello mangiato vivo possa aver fatto saltare il nostro vivere ordinario, la diversità sociale e la povertà sono state istituzionalizzate. Il nostro mondo, che crolla fornendo la consapevolezza che non finirà il mondo ma un tipo di mondo, ha evitato di investire in cose che oggi sarebbero state particolarmente utili: una sanità universale, un'ecologia obbligatoria, la fine dello sfruttamento animale, la fine dell'idea di Stato-Nazione e di cittadinanza locale. Oggi l'umanità tutta si trova unita contro ciò che avrebbe invece dovuto salvarla: la natura.

Ovviamente se il sistema generale crolla subito le conseguenze saranno estremamente dolorose: nessuno di noi è davvero pronto a cambiare vita e questo, inevitabilmente, potrebbe condurre a una sorta di selezione naturale. A una sorta di nuova specie. Ma dovrebbe tuttavia esserci chiaro, come da decenni suggeriscono le filosofie più radicali, che se il sistema proverà a ingrandirsi ancora dopo il Covid-19 millantando nuovi periodi di felicità economica a danno dell'ecologia il risultato finale non sarà il dolore di molti ma la fine di tutti. È a questo bivio, a cui la politica istituzionale è completamente impreparata, che ci troviamo davvero oggi.

Non è per nulla importante sapere quando questo succederà, se tra dieci mesi o tra dieci anni, ciò che conta è una presa di coscienza immediata che non strumentalizzi più l'ignoranza collettiva (la vera piaga contro cui lottare) dicendo come sarà dopo, quando finiranno le quarantene, quanto e come dovremmo prepararci alla ricostruzione con gioia. Sappiamo tutti che se anche internet dovesse cedere per sovraccarico in questi giorni il collasso definitivo della socialità porterebbe a una rivoluzione inimmaginabile.

Invece che mimare le nostre vite ordinarie, con conferenze Instagram o feste su Facebook e Tik Tok, dovremmo educare immediatamente la popolazione allo straordinario: la campagna invece che la città, la natura invece che la tecnologia, una vita degna anche breve piuttosto che una sopravvivenza indegna e lunga, la fine dell'impiego del tempo e l'inizio dell'uso della vita.

Chiusi nelle nostre case, posto che anche la chiusura in casa esprime un problema legato alla lotta di classe che avevamo ignorato col falso mito del benessere collettivo, oggi ognuno di noi sa che nulla sarà come prima: ci terrorizza il cambiamento, ma è altrettanto vero che forse nessuno si era mai sentito così vivo come in questo momento. Un tempo ritrovato per pensare, per leggere, per scrivere, per amare, ma anche per deprimersi: per capire che ciò che chiamavamo vita normale è stata in realtà la condizione di possibilità di questa tragedia.

Non ha nessuna importanza capire di chi sia stata la colpa, perché il male è distribuito; ciò che conta ora è provare a governare la fragilità capendo che un tipo di mondo non esiste già più e "una nuova specie di umani", come raccontavo in Fragile Umanità, potrebbe davvero affacciarsi al mondo.

Nella società ovattata da cui ora ci sentiamo respinti era necessario uno sforzo minimo per avere tutto: cibo, acqua, divertimento, viaggi. Invece ci aspetta probabilmente un tipo di mondo in cui ognuno dovrà essere artefice della propria vita in modo diverso: Saremo di meno? È possibile. Vivremo di meno? Anche questo è possibile. Ma quindi le idee della tecnologia che ci avrebbe resi immortali e perfetti erano false? Questo è certo. Ma quindi dobbiamo preparaci a considerare molti passatempi finiti in vantaggio del conseguimento di obiettivi reali? Temo di si.

Nei prossimi giorni e mesi la situazione potrebbe addirittura peggiorare: se la scienza non troverà un'immediata cura la chiusura nelle case genererà frustrazione, omicidi domestici, violenza su se stessi, alienazione, follie e disturbi della personalità. Tutte le cose che avevamo chiuso nel cassetto, sperando potessero salvarci "gli impegni" sulle nostre agende, adesso torneranno improvvisamente a manifestarsi: toccherà essere forti davvero, toccherà lavorare per questo mondo di cui sopra con la consapevolezza che non siamo noi a progettare il reale ma il reale a progettarci.

Queste poche pagine sono una semplificazione di un pensiero che da anni filosofi e intellettuali considerati minoritari producono contro gli entusiasmi tecnologici, contro le idee di un futuro sempre "migliore" del passato. Oggi l'umanità, fragile come non mai, può entrare in una nuova fase evolutiva considerandosi unica e unita senza etnie o nazioni, senza divisioni o egoismi. Avevamo un mondo fatto di comodità e certezze? Certo, ma era anche un mondo pieno di guerre, violenze, uccisioni, massacri della biodiversità ... non certo il "mondo normale" a cui pensiamo di poter tornare.

L'assuefazione alla prassi è stata troppe volte una forza più potente dell'unica aspirazione importante per una specie come la nostra: quella alla libertà. Usciremo da queste case, certo, ma non per rimetterci in un tram affollato per lavorare venti ore al giorno perché quel mondo, fortunatamente, oggi o domani crollerà. Abbiamo pensato ingenuamente di avere un immenso potere sulla natura, un potere che in realtà era un rapido percorso verso l'autodistruzione. La domanda è dunque questa: quanti altri modelli esistono per stare nel mondo? Non siate dogmatici e sorridete, queste poche pagine sono solo un'approssimazione a questioni veritiere che meriterebbero pagine e pagine; il futuro di Homo Sapiens è più simile al suo passato più remoto che alle ideologie con cui avevamo imbottito le nostre pseudo-certezze.

Potrei sbagliarmi, magari non sarà il Covid-19 ma il Covid-25 a darci questa "occasione": ma il tempo per ragionare e prepararci a ciò che si è detto e comunque poco. Iniziamo subito.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
download file Versione in Italiano su Minima e Moralia English version on NERO Editions Poi su Archphoto Video per OttN art project Norsk versjon Poi su Come Don Chisciotte Versione cartacea in italiano su Espoarte .109 (2020). Poi su Arianna Editrice Intervista su Contro Radio Una selezione del testo scelta per la mostra Pensiero Magico...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By reducing the term to a political pejorative, we risk rendering it worthless.

The Atlantic

One spring weekend, dozens of academics from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics with an ambitious goal: to define populism. None were under any illusions about how difficult this challenge would be. "The term continues to be used in many different ways," one participant observed, noting its association with issues as disparate as McCarthyism in the United States and Maoism in China. In the end, they failed to settle on a single definition, concluding that "there can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is clear what it is."

That was in 1967. More than half a century later, populism is still being used in many different ways: to describe the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., to explain Brexit in Britain, and to contextualize the disruptions taking place in national politics across the globe. The sheer scale of the phenomenon is evident in just how much everyone seems to be talking about it. Words like populist and nationalist, once confined to academic circles, have become fixtures in the lexicon. Countless books and articles have been written on the subject. The pope has weighed in on the matter as well, declaring populism an " evil " that "ends badly."

But even as definitions of populism have developed, many people are still none the wiser about what the term means. It has taken on a versatile quality-one that can be applied to politicians as varied as the Netherlands' Geert Wilders on the far right and France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left. For some, populism is part and parcel of the far right and nationalism-issues that, though not completely divorced from contemporary populist rhetoric, do little to help explain it. For others, populism has simply been reduced to a political shorthand to describe that which we do not like.

The more populism gets invoked in these ways, though, the more muddled its definition becomes. And the more muddled it becomes, the less useful it ultimately is. After all, what's the point of invoking populism without a concerted effort to apply it consistently? Lacking a clear attempt to better define such terms, we risk stripping them of their meaning entirely. Indeed, the campaign to do away with the word populist has already begun.

It's easy to understand how populism has become such a dirty word in modern politics. The term dates back to the late 19th century and the arrival of the populist People's Party in the United States. American farmers had grown frustrated with their lack of prosperity in the economic boom of the Gilded Age-an exclusion they attributed to government corruption and the outsize influence of Big Business. In the People's Party (or the Populist Party, as it was widely known) they found an outlet for those frustrations. The party, which positioned itself as an alternative to the Republicans and the Democrats, campaigned on a series of what were at the time radical policies, including increased economic regulation, nationalized railroads, and directly elected senators. Like many modern populists, the party also showed antipathy toward immigrants, blaming their presence on "the manufacturers" and their desire for "cheap labor." In the end, what doomed the Populists wasn't their failure to breach the two-party system (they gained control of state legislatures and governorships across the country), but the co-opting of their policies by the Democrats. Within a decade of its formation, the Populist Party effectively disappeared.

The term populist didn't disappear, of course. In the intervening years, it began to appear in regions as widespread as Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Still, the debate over what constituted populism was largely limited to academic settings, culminating in the first-ever conference on populism, at the LSE in 1967. It was perhaps for this reason that many argued in favor of a broad definition. "It has to be loosely organized and without a strict ideology," one academic argued. "It is perfectly legitimate to define populism in the widest, most latitudinarian fashion," added another.

Subsequent definitions have been formed since-many as broad as the academics at the LSE advised-but populism did not enter mainstream parlance for decades, largely until the twin shocks of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The term has become almost exclusively associated with upsets to the global political system ever since. The rise of the far right in Germany? Populism. Narendra Modi's nationalist project in India? Populism. The surge of anti-establishment parties in Brazil, Italy, and the Philippines? Definitely populism.
Read: The paradox of Trump's populism
Many of these cases do fall under the populist umbrella-one which, according to the author and academic Cas Mudde's widely referenced definition, is predicated on the notion that society is divided into two competing groups: the "pure people" versus the "corrupt elite." Catherine Fieschi, the author of Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism, put forward her own list of characteristics to identify populist leaders-namely, those who not only claim to represent the will of the morally superior "ordinary people," but also position themselves as uniquely capable of doing so. As a result, Fieschi argues, populists reduce their political opponents, whom they often accuse of being a part of the elite, to enemy status.

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer at Australian Catholic University and the author of Populism, describes the phenomenon not as a fixed ideology, like socialism or liberalism, but as a political style. "That is, something that is done by politicians and political actors," Moffitt told me. Populism isn't so much a belief system as "a way of speaking, acting, and presenting oneself."

Though the versatility of populism's definition makes it applicable to parties and leaders across the political spectrum, this hasn't prevented many from viewing it as an inherently far-right phenomenon that can be applied only to parties and leaders who fit the typical anti-immigrant, nativist mold. Part of this has to do with the fact that some of the most electorally successful, high-profile examples of populism have been from the far right: Marine Le Pen in France (who advanced to the runoff of the country's 2017 presidential election), Alternative for Germany (the country's largest opposition party), Viktor Orbán's ruling Fidesz in Hungary (where the prime minister has cracked down on academic and press freedom). Relatively few populist parties on the left- Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece stand out-can claim the same kind of momentum or media attention.

This perception can also be attributed to the way those on the right have chosen to talk about populism. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist who is attempting to create a global movement of nationalist parties ( to little effect), opted to embrace the populist label when describing Trump's political movement, which he likened to the populism of a Trump predecessor, Andrew Jackson. Alexander Gauland, the honorary chairman of Alternative for Germany, declared that his party was a "populist movement and proud of it." Even Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister who briefly led a coalition government alongside the far-right League until last year, said that "if populism is the attitude of listening to people's needs, then we lay a claim to it." By embracing the label, Moffitt said, what once was regarded as toxic became a tool "for signalling a lack of complicity with 'the elite' and the sense of being in touch with 'the people.'"

Those on the political right weren't the only ones to repurpose populism. The more that figures like Bannon and Gauland have embraced the populist label, the more inclined self-described antipopulists have been to reject it. Mainstream figureheads such as the U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair have all voiced their concerns about the implications of right-wing populism and its threat to liberal democracy. In doing so, they help propel the notion that populism should be understood not only as a right-wing phenomenon, but as akin to a political pejorative.
Read: Italy's answer to populism
This view has led to a number of other misconceptions: One is that any politician who invokes the will of "the people" must necessarily be a populist. If that were the case, every politician could be labeled a populist, because "everybody talks about people in a democracy," Daphne Halikiopoulou, an associate comparative-politics professor at the University of Reading, told me. Another misconception is that populism and xenophobic nationalism, or nativism, are inherently linked. In reality, neither ideology is reliant on the other to exist. "Both prioritize a particular 'in' group over an 'out' group," Halikiopoulou said, but populists tend to prioritize "ordinary people," whereas nativists prioritize those of a certain ethnic background.

A final misconception is that the populist label is appropriate for any politician who deviates from the mainstream-an idea that has been recently applied to noteworthy figures on the left, such as the outgoing British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Though both men exhibit some populist tendencies-both, for example, criticize those they consider to be part of the economic elite-they fall short of being traditional populists, at least under Fieschi's definition. For one, neither claims to represent an exclusive and homogenous "people," but rather the interests of citizens as a whole. And neither has vilified his opponents as inherently illegitimate.

The way populism is often applied suggests that its use is more for effect rather than explanation. Much in the same way that socialist has been bandied around to discredit politicians like Sanders in the U.S. (where the term conjures negative images of the Soviet Union and Chavismo in Venezuela), populist has its own negative baggage. As a result, neither of these terms ends up communicating an understood idea. Instead, they simply obscure.

We will likely never have a foolproof definition of populism-it's difficult enough to clearly define a political philosophy, let alone a political style.

Still, this doesn't preclude us from applying it more responsibly. Part of this requires more clearly defining our terms. As someone who frequently writes about populism and nationalism, I've had my own fair share of feedback about use of these terms. In my reporting of the recent Irish election, for example, I referred to Sinn Féin, a left-wing party that advocates for the unification of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as a "nationalist party," much in the same way one might use the term to describe the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Catalan independence movement. Still, some readers presumed that by calling Sinn Féin "nationalist," I was likening them to other far-right, nativist elements in Europe-a comparison that is wholly unrepresentative of the party.

Read: The new populist playbook

But it also means not overusing these terms to the point of confusion. "For example, are you speaking about Trump denigrating Mexicans? Well, that's racism, " Moffitt said. "Don't call that 'populist rhetoric' and soften the blow. It just muddies the waters."

Worse yet, it risks making the term entirely meaningless.

"If everyone is a populist in one way or another, then nobody is not a populist," Halikiopoulou said. "It explains absolutely everything, and therefore it explains nothing."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Yasmeen Serhan is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By reducing the term to a political pejorative, we risk rendering it worthless. One spring weekend, dozens of academics from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics with an ambitious goal: to define populism. None were under any illusions about how difficult this challenge would be.