Signal/Noise – CW 34/2017
Signal/Noise is a weekly collection of commented articles and essays that we deem worthy of your time.
Richard Florida Is Sorry
If decaying cities wanted to survive, they had to open cool bars, shabby-chic coffee shops, and art venues that attract young, educated, and tolerant residents. Eventually, the mysterious alchemy of the creative economy would build a new and prosperous urban core.
Today, even Florida recognizes that he was wrong.
Richard Florida invented the “creative class” at the beginning of the millennium. Since then, mayors around the world have based their development programs on his idea that a city thrives when it plays nice with the “creatives.” Now he has written a book, questioning almost all of his earlier assumptions.
After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.
These days, there is a term that has almost entirely replaced the notion of the “creative class”: gentrification.
Read: Richard Florida Is Sorry
Narratives matter
We don’t have a hard time subscribing to the recommendation that reading, and more of it, is a good idea. Hence we fully support this lecture from 2013 by Neil Gaiman (his books are excellent).
I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
And yet, despite this lecture focussing on the necessity for reading and making sure that libraries survive – not as places where books are stored, but as safe spaces for exploration — it is this anecdote that we wanted to quote. It highlights vividly, what we have been talking about for so long. It’s always great to have a personal story from a well-known author to support one owns claims.
Read: Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
‘Smokey and the Bandit’ Charm Fades as Truck Driver Hiring Lags
You know how truck drivers are among the first expected to be replaced by self-driving cars? Well, the trucking industry is facing a very different problem right now.
Most trucking companies have been able to make do so far, but as older truckers retire and an online-buying boom leads to surging deliveries, the fear is a driver shortage will spur delays and lost revenue.
That’s right. Companies can’t find enough new drivers to replace those going into retirement. “The industry was short about 48,000 drivers at the end of 2015. That shortage is expected to balloon to almost 175,000 by 2024, according to the American Trucking Associations.“
Right now, they are trying everything. From signing bonuses to making truck driving more attractive for women.
[Timothy] Judge said salary isn’t as important to drivers as companies think. They place a greater value on home time, reasonable hours and their relationship with their dispatcher.
Turns out automation is not killing trucking jobs, work-life balance is.
Then there’s the threat from autonomous trucks. In the long run, self-driving trucks that companies including Uber Technologies Inc. and Tesla Inc. are working to develop will save freight companies money. But it makes recruiting young people even tougher.
This is fascinating. The narrative of a future of self-driving trucks could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Trucking companies can’t get recruits because they are afraid of being replaced by machines, which forces the companies to indeed invest into the machines to fill the gaps left by the missing recruits…
“The hype might be a little more intense, but this is a really big deal and provoking all kinds of uncertainty,” he said. “There are people with a lot of skin in the game who are very nervous right now.”
Whoever controls the narrative, controls the future!
Read: ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ Charm Fades as Truck Driver Hiring Lags
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