NY Times: Data Center Overload
“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software [...]
Guardian.co.uk: Growing stocks of unsold cars around the world
Carmakers around the world are cutting production as inventories build up to unprecedented levels. Storage areas and docksides are now packed with vast expanses of unsold cars as demand slumps.”
“Unsold cars at Avonmouth Docks near Bristol, UK.”
“Newly imported cars fill the 150-acre site at the Toyota distribution [...]
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Marita Sturken, Duke University Press, Durham: 2007.
Serendipitously, I read Sturken’s Tourists of History while visiting one of the kitschiest cities in the Canadian prairies: Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Moose Jaw has made a tourist industry out of Chinese immigrant exploitation of the early [...]
Paysage de champs colorés près de Sarraud, Vaucluse, France (44°01’ N – 5°24’ E)
Mr. Cassan and his family cultivate more than 600 acres of both traditional or ‘true’ lavender and lavendin, a sterile, hardier and much more prolific hybrid with a cruder, industrial, camphor scent. His great-grandfather was among the first lavender middlemen in France, [...]
Factory Girl: Dora the Explorer and the Dirty Secrets of the Global Industrial Economy by Lois Leveen
Throughout her adventures, Dora enjoys an unusual geographic mobility, crossing landscapes but never distinct borders, always returning home rather than staying somewhere new. Her animated domain is devoid of references to social class, labor, or a currency-based economy.
But [...]