How to Erase a Neighborhood

In June, I visited Baku, Azerbaijan as part of a vacation around the Caucasus. I'd timed it so I'd be able to attend the first European Grand Prix, a fresh stop on the Formula 1 racing circuit, to be hosted in Baku. The race course meandered through the city center, which was close to equal parts historic buildings, old restaurants and shops, and gleaming, sparsely populated luxury stores. The glitz and glamor of Formula 1 and its global circus of the wealthy was draped against a backdrop of old castles and ambitious state-sponsored construction fueled by an oil industry that's had to weather world oil prices declining by half in the last three years.

An autocratic petrostate investing in prestige events and glistening highrises to gain a foothold on the world stage is nothing new, and it was interesting to see the world's sporting press descend on the city, mention the Dior boutiques and incoming Starbucks, and move on. It'd be easy, and not entirely unfair, to say the government of Azerbaijan aspires for Baku to be a new Dubai on the Caspian Sea. It even has its own artificial islands, although construction is ongoing. A 2013 New York Times Magazine headline sums it up nicely: "Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous."

Driving into the city from the airport, I passed down a highway lined with new apartment buildings, stadiums, and stunning architecture the likes of the Heydar Aliyev Center. But what struck me more than the city's new sheen, which is inspired by the same generically-global luxury of other booming cities—of course there's a Trump hotel in Baku—was when I took a stroll through the city to check out some historic neighborhoods, and came across one in the latter stages of being demolished to make room for a more glitzy replacement.

This was once Sovetsky, a neighborhood with buildings dating back a century, whose name reference's Azerbaijan's time as a Soviet republic, starting with Baku's capture by the 11th Red Army in 1920. More recently, Sovetsky came to be an old neighborhood in one of the city's more expensive districts, and with the steady creep of condos and luxury stores expanding its way.

The architecture of the neighborhood has a distinct, ornate style, and after seeing a few photo blogs showcasing it, I hoped to catch a few buildings before the whole neighborhood was gone.

In December 2013, the mayor of Baku called for the demolition of Sovetsky, which is home to a number of historic buildings, including mosques, a church, and homes of famous Azeris. Officials have said they will protect these buildings, but the residential buildings are to be replaced with construction more fitting to the city's desire to be a cosmopolitan destination. Deputy Prime Minister Abid Sharifov recently told reporters that Sovetsky will be dominated by greenery and parks, saying that "No new residential buildings will be built in that area,” according to a report from the local newspaper Kaspi.

The Kaspi report added that 2400 buildings have been torn down since 2013. The city has built new housing for some displaced residents, in most cases on the outskirts of the city, which they have said isn't a fair trade for valuable property in the city center.

Sovetsky residents began protesting forced evictions in 2014, saying that the government's compensation for their property was far below market rate. "Residents complain that the compensation offer of 1500 Manats (1397 Euros) per square meter is not enough to purchase a new property," Radio Free Europe's Azerbaijan bureau reported at the time. "Instead, residents are demanding up to 5000 Manats (4650 Euros) per square meter, which they believe is the current market price for downtown real estate."

The demolition of Sovetsky is part of a larger modernization effort by the city, which has evicted residents from undesirable neighborhoods as it's concurrently hosted events like the 2015 European Games and the F1 race this year. In 2012, Human Rights Watch accused the Baku government of "illegal expropriation of properties and forcible evictions of dozens of families in four Baku neighborhoods, at times without warning or in the middle of the night."

"The authorities subsequently demolished homes, sometimes with residents’ possessions inside," the group's report continued. "The government has refused to provide homeowners fair compensation for the properties, many of which are in highly desirable locations. Azerbaijani law stipulates that market value should be paid in compensation for a forced sale."

While I was dodging backhoes, this gentleman, who we'll call Ferid since he didn't give me his name, came by to say hello and show me around. Ferid was working with a crew helping a few families move out of an apartment block that was still standing despite most of the land around it having already been cleared.

(Ferid saw the tattoos on my arms and showed off his; when I told Ferid I was a journalist, he said I should share his too. Full transparency: I'm only publishing these photos now because I thought I'd lost them, but consider the promise fulfilled.)

This is the apartment block he was helping clear out, whose residents had mostly cleared out. Through an interpreter, Ferid explained that the government had shut off water and power to the apartments, with residents being forced to accept property buyouts and move far out of the city to apartment buildings in more affordable neighborhoods. He also said that one family was still holding out.

Ferid introduced me to Mr. Aliyev, pictured here, who had been in the same building for decades with his family. He was trying to hang onto his property as long as possible despite the lack of utilities. Through an interpreter, Aliyev said that the city government's offer for compensation was way below what his property was worth, and he railed against being forced out of his home to make way for housing for wealthier people.

At one point two of his grandkids poked their heads out of one of the windows, and he asked how the city could leave a whole family in their building without water or power.

Aliyev's house was about a two kilometer walk to the Flame Towers (those mirrored buildings in the center there), which glow with a flame lighting effect at night to celebrate both the country's historical identity as The Land of Fire as well as to show off its oil wealth.

The pace of progress is relentless, especially in a nation trying to assert itself on the world stage. Just about every city I've visited around the world has had parts cordoned off and undergoing rapid change. But this scene in Sovetksy, of multiple backhoes working in concert to clear rubble, stuck with me.

The grand prix in Baku was not hugely attended, but it's scheduled again for 2017. Organizers signed a five-year contract to host the race, and they have assured that its budget is secure. (The Financial Times explained nicely why that might not be the case for any of the oil-rich nations hosting F1 races.) But it's unclear how Baku's growth will be affected by the oil bubble bursting. Today I looked up the blocks I shot above on Google Maps, and whatever was left when I was there is now gone.

from How to Erase a Neighborhood

Here Are the 10 Most Popular Motherboard Stories from 2016

Motherboard published thousands of stories this year. Some of them were great, some of them were kinda bland; some of them were hugely popular, some fell flat. Those two gradients are always as tightly correlated as we'd like, but running an internet media outlet means successfully blending our big, intensive features and investigations with more digestible reporting and some fun stuff too. Editing is not much different than DJing, and sometimes you first gotta play Montell Jordan before you get people dancing to Curtis Mayfield.

I'm happy to report that all the stories on our list of favorites—our most ambitious, our most impactful, the ones we all got in this business to do—were, on the whole, read by a whole boatload of people.

But what were our most popular stories, the ones most scintillatingly clicky, the ones that jumped out and grabbed your eyeballs as you thumbed through your feeds? In a shock change from years past, the most-read stories we published this year weren't all about sex and drugs. I'm not sure if that says more about the Motherboard staff or all of you lovely readers out there, but hey, I'm sure our moms are happy.

The #1 Most Popular Motherboard Post of 2016
Watch This Guy Turn on a 20,000 Watt Light Bulb
Video posts are the most consistently popular format on Motherboard, so this one going wild doesn't come as a shock. We don't aggregate news, but we do try to publish a couple cool vids a day since you all sure seem to like them. We do too!

2. Goodbye World: We’ve Passed the Carbon Tipping Point For Good
Headlines are the most important factor in whether a story gets read or not, which is why there are so many terrible or misleading ones out there, or good headlines on stories that don't deliver. This is a good headline on a great story, and I'm stoked to see an environment story at #2 this year.

3. 'Pokémon Go' Players Are Spoofing GPS Locations to Catch' Em All
Pokémon Go appeared to be a traffic bonanza for just about every site that could cover it, as the game was just a wee bit popular for a hot moment this year. I'm happy that our most-read PoGo story highlighted one fundamental question about the game: How willing are people to leave the house to play a video game? Obviously folks were more than willing to during the height of the craze, but now? Maybe not so much.

4. Watch Over 100 People Try to Stop a Plane Landing in GTA V
It's all too easy to be cynical about viral videos but I enjoyed the hell out of this one. It's always cool to see people band together for a singular task online, and stopping a jet with a crowd makes for one surreal experience.

5. Watch a Speed Test Comparing All the iPhones Ever Made
I'm not entirely sure that iPhone news is as popular as they used to be, but it doesn't seem that way. In any case, comparisons like this make for a great entry point in some tech history, which we all love. (For some more ephemeral gadget history, Tedium is always fun to read.)

6. Geniuses Say Apple Knows About iPhone 6 ‘Touch Disease’, Won't Admit It Publicly
We're always pushing Motherboard to take a more populist approach: Shiny gadgets and laser-armed drones are all fun to think about, but what matters the most it how those things affect all of us. I'm glad to see that this exposé on a critical hardware flaw that Apple refused to discuss publicly, despite tons of user complaints, did as well as it did as it's an ideal Motherboard story.

7. The Artist Behind ‘Baby Dick’ Trump Pic Is Now Banned from Facebook
Trump stories surely topped the list of a lot of media outlets' most popular reads of 2016. Since so much of Trump news revolves around microcontroversies that he creates himself to distract from past controversies—an outrage pyramid scheme, I guess—we didn't cover him all that much, aside from his astounding lack of concrete positions on most everything in our wheelhouse. But Facebook's ongoing difficulties with its News Feed and censorship are notable, and this story makes for a rather bizarre juxtaposition with the other big story this year about Facebook blocking an image.

8. Who Is the Last Active Player in This Long-Dead MMO?
This is a question I never thought about until it was asked, and now I can't stop thinking about entropy in digital worlds.

9. Climate Change Just Opened a 'Gateway to the Underworld' in Siberia
A truly fascinating story that highlights one of the biggest questions around our warming world: What happens when permafrost melts? Well, all kinds of crazy shit happens, from releasing ancient viruses to opening up hell portals. Let's try to keep the frozen stuff frozen, okay?

10. The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic
I love weird sounds!

from Here Are the 10 Most Popular Motherboard Stories from 2016

The 2016 Election Has Failed the Future

We are living in an unprecedented transitional period here on Earth. On the one hand, the pace of scientific and technological innovation has accelerated to faster than ever before; on the whole, humanity is healthier, more prosperous, better connected, and better educated.

On the other, we face an uncertain future of myriad threats, from catastrophic climate change; to technological inequality and entrenched, systemic discrimination; and more esoteric existential risks including superbugs, asteroids, food system collapse, superintelligent AI, and whatever else you can think of.

Many of these issues have compelling arguments on all sides; all of them require serious discussion about how we wish to respond. And yet during the three presidential debates, we heard nothing. In an election marred by apocalyptic rhetoric, is the future too scary to discuss?

Aside from a pragmatic, but hardly eye-opening, question about energy policy from Ken Bone, climate change did not make a single appearance in this year's election debates. Why can't the most important democratic decision in the world engage with the most pressing issue of our time? That is, in a word, incredible.

Climate change, and the environment as a whole, has always taken a backseat to more pressing economic and social justice issues—which, for what it's worth, were also largely ignored this year—and that's fine. It's unfair to expect voters to ignore the gaping wounds they're staring at, and to instead pay attention to a potential hand grenade that's Plinko-ing its way down towards their heads.

There's no zinger that can slow climate change, and no comeback to drag inequality into oblivion

But securing our future is not a zero-sum game. Our presidents should be capable of juggling more than one issue while in office, and the must be able to address immediate issues—jobs, civil rights, healthcare, and so on—while also having the vision to prepare for, and even take advantage of, the long-term concerns that threaten everything we do. We must demand that candidates do the same while on the campaign trail, when all they're required to deliver are ideas.

Climate change is especially important in this regard, as it will exacerbate most of the other ills of our current world, including resource-based conflict, pandemics, extreme weather, and food insecurity. For example, Florida is set to be ravaged by rising seas, including the properties of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. But rising seas are just one final problem; in the interim, we can expect warming weather to negatively influence everything from hurricanes to the spread of disease, as is potentially the case with Zika (which also didn't make an appearance in the debates, despite an ongoing funding crisis).

For all the pseudo-talk of the economy in the debates, climate change is already costing us billions of dollars a year, and it is only going to get worse, as even the Pentagon is preparing for.

And despite this endless stream of bad news and heel-dragging from our elected officials, we're already seeing positive impacts from investment in clean energy and divestment from climate-polluting industries. There's no better time to push harder on mitigating the worst effects of climate change, which threatens all aspects of our livelihoods. Ignoring the climate for favor of arguing over who's a stronger leader is simply irresponsible.

Climate may be the largest threat for humanity as a whole, but here in the US, the most immediately pressing one is inequality. Inequality is a problem across all demographic breakdowns—racial, economic, geographic, and so on—and for yet another election, the answer has been summed up with varying shades of the word "jobs." It's too late to reverse the tide of globalism, unless we want to turn ourselves into some sort of hermit kingdom, but as the leader of the tech economy, the United States is still in a strong position to shape the world's economy to our advantage.

This is not a simple truth: As shuffling alliances and developing nations reshape the world order, and as the massive disparity in income and capital in the US mixes with a future economy defined less by ownership and more by timesharing everything, the non-barons among us have a difficult road ahead.

And yet the closest either candidate has come to discussing that reality publicly came from a leaked conversation Hillary Clinton had with a Brazilian bank, which featured enough big thinking that naturally she downplayed it at last night's debate. Instead, we've been served the same platitudes: cutting taxes to spur jobs, as Trump offered, or investing in infrastructure and education because trickle-down economics do not work, as Clinton said.

Let's take a basic issue that helped fuel Trump's rise: the ongoing isolation of rural economies. Our nation is becoming more urban, and cities are the centerpiece of our service-based, high-tech economy. What do we do for everyone else? Trump has promised to bring coal mining jobs back, which runs counter to every market force in the energy sector. Meanwhile, actual discussion about how to keep rural communities connected to high-tech infrastructure, education, and investment has fallen by the wayside.

These are some of the topics that were never mentioned, by either candidate, in any debate Erik Hauntin October 20, 2016

The list of issues that never were mentioned in any of the debates is long, and all are crucial to ending this century in a better place than we started. To Clinton's credit, she has very detailed policy positions available and a long track record if you're willing to look, while Donald Trump does not. They've both given their soundbites on the campaign trail, which gives a peek into their thinking.

But to not see either of them forced to defend those positions on any of the debate stages has left us all without insight into how they would actually enact them while in office. The debates are the cornerstone of the election, where candidates have to actually win our vote. All I want is to hear more from these candidates about what they would do to help bring forth a better tomorrow. But in those debates, that's been largely ignored.

There's no zinger that can slow climate change, and no comeback to drag inequality into oblivion. This is the nature of any presidential election, as they're all ultimate spectacle. But to see such vapidity on display for so long lowers the bar for what we as voters should demand. The president remains the most powerful person in our nation, and we cannot give them the job so lightly.

from The 2016 Election Has Failed the Future

Rocko's Modern Life Predicted Our Lame Future

Image: Nick Animation Studios

Rocko's Modern Life has stuck with me for 22 years. Even though it's a cartoon from the 1990s, the show is eerily insightful about the way we interact with technology and the environment. I recently talked to “Rocko” creator Joe Murray about the show and his obsession with the mundane complications presented by modern life, which makes the show feel more prescient than any of its programming peers. He also told me that he’s actually put a team together for an hour-long Rocko TV special, which was officially announced by Nickelodeon today, and which does not yet have a set cast or release date.

In the latest episode of Radio Motherboard, we hear from Murray and his upcoming show. I also talk to Sean Yeaton, a friend and young dad, about the show, our relationship with technology, and what it's like to see your kids interact with things we never could have imagined in the Rocko days.

With the announcement of the show at hand, I figured it’d be fun to recount one of the most obvious challenges facing adding a new chapter to a show like “Rocko”: What would it actually be like for someone to greet the current modern world after 20 years removed in space?

Read more: Rocko's Modern Life Is Making a Comeback

from Rocko's Modern Life Predicted Our Lame Future

Thank God I Found This Picture, For Now My Raw Emotions Have Been Sanded Smooth

Image: "Crowded Pillow" by Tony Alter

The future is wonderful, the future is terrifying. That's the oldest Motherboard tagline, and it can easily be applied to the present as well. Sometimes an amazing breakthrough happens, and human potential feels limitless; other times, distant disasters get brought into our screens, and the world feels too small. In any case, Flickr user Tony here, who says he has "to fake I am asleep or Jimmy Dean will start licking my face and Frank will paw at me to scratch his head or belly," has it figured out.

Have a nice weekend, dearest Motherboarders. As always, feel free to send us a note at letters@motherboard.tv or just ping me on Twitter, I'm at @derektmead.

from Thank God I Found This Picture, For Now My Raw Emotions Have Been Sanded Smooth