Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
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The **Lindy effect** (also known as **Lindy's Law**) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future [life expectancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle#Longevity_Estimation) of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence or competition and greater odds of continued existence into the future.
Lindy Effect
wikipedia.org
Because we spend our life indoors—like animals in a zoo—we are obsessed with the weather,” architect Rem Koolhaas once cynically quipped. We remain similarly obsessed with our bodies as the internet hypothetically diminishes their practical significance. As Grief notes, our corporeality is increasingly a liability, our bodies diminishing assets that require constant maintenance.
Margaritas at the Mall
Kneeling Bus
The pandemic highlighted our intimate relationship with biology. Urban tech is already charting these new urban landscapes and frontiers. Sampling sewage for COVID-19 virus was a key source of data that helped anticipate outbreaks in many cities, weeks before clinical tests revealed a new spike. And biomedical researchers are sequencing the microbiomes within urban transit systems in dozens of cities to compare notes on local fauna.
Forecast: Wild & Well | the Future of Urban Tech
futureofurbantech.org
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