In the spring of 1940 the telephone rang in the graduate residence at Princeton, and Richard Feynman, then a doctoral student, picked it up to hear the voice of his advisor, John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler skipped the greeting. He had solved a mystery no one else had thought to name, he said, and he knew why every electron in the universe carries exactly the same mass and exactly the same charge. The answer was that they are all the same electron.
The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.
Continue reading → Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?
Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.
We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.
I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.
Continue reading → The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury
We live in a time of Intemperate Tyrants — and the levels of expectation they set for those who elected them — leads us straight into the grave and never above the Heavens. What have we done, as a country, and a nation, to deserve the leaderless examples of the bloodless Donald Trump and the vampiric Chris Christie?
It’s tax season! Beware the Ides of February! Yesterday, Janna and I were disappointed to learn someone filed a tax return in our name. We discovered this identity theft when we diligently filed our 2015 taxes online via TurboTax and quickly learned our returns had not only been rejected by the IRS, but also by the New York and New Jersey tax offices! I later learned if the Feds reject your return, the States, in turn, will automatically reject your return, too. That’s good there’s some sort of communal, emergency, trigger that is in place for this homegrown brand of unsophisticated, commonplace, thievery.
Continue reading → Beware the Ides of February: Your Identity Has Been Stolen!
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