James "New Aesthetic" Bridle (previously) is several kinds of provocateur and artist (who can forget his autonomous vehicle trap, to say nothing of his groundbreaking research on the violent Youtube Kids spammers who came to dominate the platform with hour+ long cartoons depicting cartoon characters barfing and murdering all over each other?).

For decades, the WELL has rung in the new year with a weeks-long public discussion led by Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling (2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2007, 2005, etc).

According to The Guardian, there's a team of researchers in northern Greece who have spent the last few years experimenting with ways to harvest metal though agriculture:

In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as "hyperaccumulators": plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life.

I was lucky enough to be invited to submit a piece to Ian Bogost's Atlantic series on the future of cities (previously: James Bridle, Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter, Adam Greenfield); I told Ian I wanted to build on my 2017 Locus column about using networks to allow us to coordinate our work and play in a way that maximized our freedom, so that we could work outdoors on nice days, or commute when the traffic was light, or just throw an impromptu block party when the neighborhood needed a break.

James Bridle (previously) is the latest contributor to The Atlantic's excellent series on the future of cities (Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter, Adam Greenfield); in a new piece, Greenfield discusses the phenomenon of "virtual citizenship," and how it affects cities that are either turned into dumping-grounds for inconvenient poor people, or rootless, tax-dodging one-percenters.

Plenty of parents are unsettled by abysmal quality of videos aimed at kids on Youtube — which range from the merely dull/hacky/ultra-branded to the slurry of possibly-autogenerated brain porridge that James Bridle recently documented.

The design director and video-producer Rion Nakaya got sick of this same sludge, so she created The Kid Should See This, a site that curates genuinely gorgeous and thought-provoking videos — ones that aren't necessarily aimed at kids, so anyone, of any age, would also dig them. — Read the rest

James Bridle takes a deep dive into the weird world of Youtube Kids videos, whose popular (think: millions and millions of views) genres and channels include endless series of videos of children being vomited on by family members and machinima-like music videos in which stock cartoon characters meet gory, violent ends.

James Bridle (previously) honors the The Cloud Index, "a tool for actionable weather forecasts" at London's Serpentine Gallery, with a lyrical longread about the history of clouds, science, war and computation.

James "New Aesthetic" Bridle writes, "I wrote an SF short story about satellites, space weapons, UN inspectors, and the end of personal data! I hope you like it."

James Bridle's new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance.

James Bridle writes, "A couple of months ago I released a browser extension – Citizen Ex – which tracks your browsing (entirely privately) in order to show you your "Algorithmic Citizenship" – where your browsing actually goes, and what this means for your rights."

James Bridle writes: "There's huge debate in the UK about the deaths of people in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, but we rarely see or hear the people themselves."

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (author of the brilliant Coding Freedom) spent years embedded with Anonymous and has written an indispensable account of the Anonymous phenomenon.

James Bridle has released a CC-licensed DIY Drone Shadows handbook (PDF), which explains, in detail, how to make accurate drone-shadow street art in your town/neighborhood. It's part of a larger project around Dirty Wars, a documentary on drone warfare currently touring the UK.

James Bridle photographed every CCTV between his home in east London and Dalston Junction, a 1.4mi walk with about 140 cameras. Welcome to London, where we have 11 CCTVs per red blood cells.

Every CCTV camera between my house and Dalston Junction

(via Super Punch)

David Cox interviews Bruce Sterling about the significance, lifecycle and future of the New Aesthetic movement:

First to the issue of "is the New Aesthetic really new?" I'd say those images are "new'" pretty much by definition. Aesthetics obviously is very old.

Matt sez,

PepysRd.com is an innovative online story based on Capital by John Lanchester, the first big London post-crash novel. Capital interweaves the lives and stories of the residents of Pepys Road, looking at the recent financial crash and its effect on our everyday lives.

James Bridle created Rorschmap, which kaleidoscopes the satellite views of your favorite spots (shown here, the center of Manhattan).

Rorschmap

(via Waxy)

James Bridle published "the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books."

Archiving Iraq: One Wikipedia Entry's Edit Wars, Printed in 12 Volumes