| In today's edition: Afrofuturism, Mr. Robot, the hammer of choice, transient autism, fertility tracking, universal basic income, and predictive policing. *** Bay Area: Come to our latest monthly event in Oakland on Wednesday! We'll be talking Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism with Channing Gerard Joseph (and I'll be glossing what we've been calling intersectional futurism). It's free. I tend bar. We all talk. *** 1. The framing of Mr. Robot. "The cinematography of MR. ROBOT has re-written the rules for how to shoot episodic television. Characters creep at the bottom of the screen, occupying a small quadrant of the frame which allows for brilliant negative space. Rami Malek is often in focus while the world around him is blurred, creating a paranoia and urgency. Tod Campbell, the show's director of photography, uses the camera to create subtext, every move has purpose. You aren't a viewer, you're participant. In a new montage from Semih Okmn, the framing of MR. ROBOT takes center stage. Take note, because it won't be long until you start seeing DPs trying to riff on Campbell's style. Enjoy." + Show's back in July, FYI. 2. This is smart on what Facebook has become. "If you’re building a SaaS startup, then your biggest competitor isn’t a competitor. It’s Microsoft Excel. That was the mantra a few years ago. Add in Google Docs and it still holds true. Contact lists, mailing lists, accounts, invoicing, market research, budgets, checklists, schedules, timetables: Excel is the hammer of choice for anything that looks like data in a business, large or small. Today, if you’re building a service for communities or individuals then Facebook is almost certainly your biggest competitor. B2B: Excel, B2C: Facebook." 3. When an autism diagnosis just goes away. "Autism is on the rise. Between 2012 and 2014, the prevalence rose from 1 in 88 to 1 in 68 children at age 8 — an increase of about 30 percent. But a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals an interesting twist. Roughly 13 percent of children with autism eventually lose their diagnosis, either because they outgrow it or because they never had autism to begin with. The findings, published 20 October in Autism, highlight a pitfall of the tracking techniques that epidemiologists use. Surveys and medical-record reviews provide a snapshot of autism’s frequency that may fail to capture these ‘lost’ diagnoses, inflating the prevalence. There is also value in understanding which children lose their diagnosis and why." 4. Deanna Day's dissertation on fertility tracking apps. "Despite the rhetoric of the patient as consumer that has pervaded popular and scholarly discourse in the twentieth century, my principal actors — women who use temperature tracking to care for their children and to chart their fertility — engaged in rigorous medical work. I explore how women have contributed to scientific discoveries surrounding ovulation, how they integrated nineteenth-century ideas of environmental health and the body with modern scientific notions, and how their labor has refashioned their subjectivity. Through doing this work, female temperature trackers have accepted responsibility for a particular kind of regimented and predictable bodily functioning, as well as blame for its failure." 5. The thing about Universal Basic Income: what will societies be willing to give up to get it? "This year, the Finnish government hopes to begin granting every adult citizen a monthly allowance of €800 (roughly $900). Whether rich or poor, each citizen will be free to use the money as he or she sees fit. The idea is that people are responsible for their actions. If someone decides to spend their €800 on vodka, that is their decision, and has nothing to do with the government. In return for the UBI, however, the public accepts the elimination of most welfare services. Currently, the Finnish government offers a variety of income-based assistance programs for everything from housing to children’s education to property insulation. Axing these programs should free up enough public resources to finance the UBI. The bureaucracy that currently governs welfare payments will disappear. There will no longer be any need to ask for government help, nor to fill out forms or wait for the competent authorities to examine each dossier to determine eligibility." On Fusion: Big data and racial profiling: our mini-doc on predictive policing in Santa Cruz, CA and the future of law enforcement. 1. oneperfectshotdb.com 2. alexmuir.com | @stratechery 3. spectrumnews.org 4. deannaday.net | @moiraweigel 5. city-journal.org Subscribe to The Newsletter Brilliant Negative Space  | 