“The postmillennial comeback of Brutalism is not surprising, given today’s worldwide vogue for strenuously exhibitionistic architecture enabled by computer design, which has resulted in grotesque behemoths far stranger than anything achievable through the relatively low-tech means of concrete construction. Some older observers will see this fascination with grandiosity and ugliness as the return of the repressed, a reminder of why Brutalism fell into disfavor and disrepute in the first place.”
Tag: 12.22.16
The Big Data-Fication Of Everything Has Some Serious Flaws
In fact, the datafication of everything is reductive. For a start, it leaves behind whatever can’t be quantified. And as Cathy O’Neil points out in her insightful and disturbing book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, datafication often relies on proxies—stand-ins that can be enumerated—that bear little or no relation to the things they are supposed to represent: credit scores as a proxy for the likelihood of being a good employee, for example, or “big five” personality tests like the ones used by the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, even though, as O’Neil reports, “research suggests that personality tests are poor predictors of job performance.”
Zadie Smith, Accepting A Literary Award, Gives A Scorching Speech About Her Books And ‘Multiculturalism’
“I did not realize that the life I was living was considered in any way provisional or experimental by others: I thought it was just life. And when I wrote a novel about the London I grew up in, I further did not realize that by describing an environment in which people from different places lived relatively peaceably side by side, I was ‘championing’ a situation that was in fact on trial and whose conditions could suddenly be revoked.”