Here’s an assortment of the best things I’ve read on the internet lately, none of which were published in the past week:

Walking to the mall: Ten years ago Tom Chiarella published this essay in Esquire about, well, walking to the mall—in Indianapolis, where walking to the mall makes even less sense than elsewhere. He imbues the journey with an epic quality, stretching it out in time, without forgetting the absurdity of what he’s doing or the nondescriptness of shoulders and embankments meant to be seen at 40+ miles per hour, if at all. In short: You’re not supposed to walk to the mall. A perfect description of the suburban carscape and a nonfiction companion to Ballard’s Concrete Island.

Wardriving: Some family in rural Kansas is being terrorized by strangers because their farm occupies the default geographic coordinates for IP addresses with unknown locations (more of what I described as digital NIMBYism). Companies like MaxMind apparently compile computers’ locations in online databases for sale to advertisers. One of the techniques for collecting that data caught my attention: wardriving, or sending cars driving around to physically collect IP addresses from open wi-fi networks. I keep picturing armadas of vehicles roaming small towns in middle America like the darknet version of Google’s Street View cars. In case you were wondering, the term wardriving is a reference to the “wardialing” done by Matthew Broderick’s character in the movie WarGames.

The Nostalgic Comfort of Normcore Dining: In the search-don’t-sort augmented reality that Google/Yelp/Foursquare ushered in, being ordinary is the only way to hide. I didn’t understand what normcore was until I read this.

   Concrete island (source)

Our Brand Could be Your Crisis: One of the best pieces I’ve come across in a while. I still haven’t seen the Zac Efron movie, We Are Your Friends, that Ayesha Siddiqi reviews here (I’m going to!) but she accomplishes the impossible, writing a thoughtful—brilliant, really—essay about that dreaded topic, the millennial. Required reading for anyone wanting a better grip on the current zeitgeist, the one you and I are too old to understand, just like Snapchat. Siddiqi also sees in the film the cultural evidence of our slow, ongoing economic collapse, which manifests itself in such subtle ways (what Bret Easton Ellis calls post-empire). “We can invent an app, start a blog, sell things online” could become a mantra for all of us. I’ve been looking for a way to build a longer post off of ideas embedded in this essay, but until then I’m stashing it here. Read it. 

Walmart: Last month Bloomberg ran this darker companion to the above essay. This is a truly dystopian look at how much crime happens on Walmart’s properties and the problems that crime creates for the local police forces that have to deal with it all, not to mention the cities from which the megastores have carved out a big privatized chunk. Corporate commercial space is not public space. Enjoy your weekend!