Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.

Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado.

But when accounting for all of the waste, energy consumption and transportation of goods required of a luxury hotel with two restaurants – not to mention the fact that buildings alone account for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions – will your $300 to $500 purchase of a room at Populus really help fight climate change?

“There are a lot of layers to this,” says Joel Hartter, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor who specializes in corporate sustainability. “On paper, it looks great. But it would take a lot of research to verify those claims.”

“There are a lot of layers to this,” says Joel Hartter, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor who specializes in corporate sustainability. “On paper, it looks great. But it would take a lot of research to verify those claims.”

As a term, however, “carbon positive” can be linguistically confusing (“carbon negative” would be literally more accurate), and with no clear definition of what “carbon positive” means, there are no metrics by which to determine its validity.

Jon Buerge is the president of Urban Villages, the sustainable development company behind Populus. He defines carbon positive as “sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere than would ever be emitted over the lifetime of the project”.

But just how much CO₂ emissions can you attribute to any one project? Hartter admits it’s a challenge.

“You have to account for several factors: direct emissions from the hotel itself, such as HVAC systems and company vans; emissions from purchased electricity that powers the building, including lighting, heating and cooling; and indirect emissions, like the transportation of goods, the carbon footprint of construction materials, waste disposal and guest travel. In this case, you must also consider site preparation, building materials, supply chains and everything brought into the hotel – from beds and furniture to TVs. You also have to think about the timescale over which offsetting occurs,” he explains. “It’s complex, and this is what many of the world’s largest companies are currently grappling with.”

Buerge is eager to unpack all the ways that Populus has reduced its carbon footprint both through the construction of the building – using recycled materials, low-carbon concrete and only 100% renewable energy in its operations.

“These goals led to some pretty unique approaches to hospitality,” says Buerge. “We decided not to have any onsite parking. One hundred per cent of our food products are sourced locally, and all food waste will be turned into compost and returned to those same farms.” He says the hotel also utilized eco-friendly materials such as beetle-kill wood, fly ash concrete (which emits far less carbon than traditional concrete, yet has never been used in a commercial building before) and leather made from reishi mushrooms.

“We’ve talked a lot about biophilic design, resembling nature,” says Buerge of the hotel’s interior. “It’s made to resemble a walk through the woods.”

However, it’s their promise to plant one spruce tree in Colorado for every guest that stays at Populus that their carbon positive balance sheet hinges upon. A decades-long beetle epidemic has destroyed millions of acres of trees throughout the US west, contributing to outbreaks of wildfires and devastating whole ecosystems. In pursuit of removing carbon from the atmosphere via new trees, Buerge collaborated with the US Forest Service, who directed them toward beetle-resistant spruce trees.

Buerge says they have already planted 70,000 spruce trees throughout Colorado’s National Wilderness Preservation System to offset emissions accrued in the building process of the hotel, with another 20,000 to be planted this year.

“We’re not just buying carbon credits, we’re not even just planting trees,” he says. “We’re reforesting Colorado forests.”

Jay Arehart, an architectural engineering professor at University of Colorado Boulder, has been following the Populus project for a long time and is impressed with its creators’ approach to a low-carbon development and the legitimacy of their ambitious offset goals, which he says are very rare in commercial real estate, since the construction of buildings comes with such a high carbon price tag.

“It’s a great pilot program that could definitely set a precedent,” he says. “When thinking about net-zero goals that companies might have – or are forced to have – this is a project we could point to as evidence that it can be done.”

While Hartter is cynical about companies over-relying on carbon offsets – it’s “like eating KFC every day, then paying someone in Florida to eat vegetables”, he says – he is optimistic about Urban Village’s new hotel. “They’re doing the right things: table-to-farm foods, solutions for waste, lining the sidewalks with trees, which will reduce heat.”

But, he warns, failure to live up to their claims could come back to bite them. “Millennials and gen Z often align their values to their pocketbooks, and their brand loyalty is based on a company’s sustainable values,” he says. “I really hope Populus’s aims stand up beyond just marketing.”

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When Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin teamed up with a group of dumpster-diving punk artists to turn a bowling alley into an interdimensional funhouse, nobody could’ve predicted they’d end up sparking an economic revolution in the art world.

But that’s exactly what Meow Wolf is up to.

The Santa Fe company has somehow managed to walk that razor-thin line between commercial success and artistic freedom. Its immersive art installation/concert venue, House of Eternal Return (picture Yellow Submarine reimagined by Isaac Asimov), has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to the New Mexico capital, generating enough revenue to pay its hive of DIY artists a livable wage with benefits, and to expand its mind-bending attractions to five new cities.

Though as Meow Wolf leave behind the Artful Dodger life of squatting in warehouses for the comfort of being a multimillion-dollar corporation, it’s faced with the same dilemma once encountered by the Clash, Roseanne Barr, and Rolling Stone magazine: How do you maintain your underground credibility while making a fuckload of money?

This conundrum has been playing out in Denver, Colorado, where Meow Wolf recently announced its intention to build a $50 million instillation in one of the poorest sections of the city, sparking concerns about exacerbating gentrification and crushing the underground art scene.

“I’m worried about them working with that amount of cash,” says Kalyn Heffernan of the hip-hop group Wheelchair Sports Camp, who has performed at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and has been protesting gentrification in Denver. She fears a big-budget project like Meow Wolf could negatively impact the low-income neighborhood of Sun Valley. “Nobody’s tried this before. It seems like they want to be better [than most corporations]. But anything on this scale is going to be problematic.”

While she has her concerns, Heffernan, as with most other artists in the DIY community, is cautiously optimistic about Meow Wolf Denver. This is in part due to Meow Wolf’s self-professed intent to change the economic game for artists, a very contentious issue in the city.

“Artists in this city are not making a lot of money,” says Wesley Watkins, a Denver musician with Other Black (and formerly Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats). “I want to make sure that the local artists that have been here and fighting are going to be respected. I’d like to see a venue that’s representing a wide-variety of sound and culture, all races, all walks.”

Due to warehouse spaces being eaten up by the marijuana boom, various income inequality issues, and persecution from city officials, many of Denver’s DIY arts communities, which often create and reside in commercial warehouse spaces, have been decimated. Following accusations of selling-out the city to developers, city officials have been looking to extend tax dollars, and an olive branch, to the underground art scene.

By default, Meow Wolf has found itself brokering between these two factions.

“We don’t want to be a savior [of DIY arts],” says Vince Kadlubek, CEO and co-founder of Meow Wolf. “We just want to be behind-the-scenes patrons. And to help build a bridge between the city and the DIY arts community.”

Its cozy relationship with the Denver legislators, along with its multimillion dollar projects, have inspired suspicion from the queer-punk culture that Meow Wolf grew out of.

Kadlubek, however, had no idea he would end up the face of a large corporation when he helped form Meow Wolf on Valentines Day 2008. “We were in a 900 square-foot art collective, just throwing small punk, hip-hop, and metal shows,” he recalls of their early days in Santa Fe, working out of a poorly insulated warehouse. “There were 14 artists and we decorated the space, filling every inch with a lot of chicken wire, papier-mâché, dumpstered materials. There was no money involved, except for everyone pitching in on rent.”

To turn Meow Wolf into a profitable operation, a requirement if it wanted to fund more ambitious projects, it would need a clean, warm, permanent space to work with. So Kadlubek reached out to his former employer at a local theater, whose fantasy novels were experiencing some success as an HBO series (ahem, Game of Thrones) to ask if he’d like to purchase an abandoned bowling alley on the outskirts of town, and become one of their first investors.

“If George [R.R. Martin] had not come forward to buy the building, I think we might have dismantled,” Kadlubek says.

Launched in March 2016, the House of Eternal Return was a relative overnight success. Guests to the attraction first enter a cozy domestic home, then, through their own exploration, discover that the cabinets, washing machine, refrigerator, and other sections of the house are portals into alternate dimensions where neon rainforests lead to Kubrick-clean spacecrafts, a vintage 90s arcade, and a cozy living room in an endless labyrinth of trippy sights and sounds.

HOER held a broad appeal for everyone from suburban tourists to druggy artists, casting a wide—and lucrative—net.

Once production on HOER was completed, Kadlubek says, “Some of the investors suggested we let [the artists] go, and then hire them back for the next project. To me, that felt like a shitty continuation of the gig economy, seeing artists as disposable. So instead we sold 25 percent of the company for $17 million [and] brought all the artists on as salaried employees with benefits. In order to maintain our team at that level, we had to expand, and have an investment narrative that will bring enough money in.” This came in the form of five new Meow Wolf locations outside of Santa Fe.

So far, Kadlubek has only announced plans for Meow Wolf projects in Denver and Las Vegas, while floating the possibility of landing in Austin, DC, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Since announcing Meow Wolf Denver, he’s been making the rounds to every corner of the Denver art scene, listening to the concerns of every cartoonist, comedian, zinester, painter, musician, and slam poet he comes in contact with in the hopes that he can make Meow Wolf a complement to the underground art scene, and not a black hole that consumes it.

“Community outreach to me is individual relationships, it’s showing up; for me, it’s a top priority,” he says. “As CEO, my job is to build as valuable a company as I can, and to us value isn’t just dollars, it’s being a part of a community. We’re trying our best to be a model for how a corporation should enter into a market… We are concerned about gentrification, so we sponsored the gentrification summit in Denver last week.”

The plot of land Meow Wolf will be moving onto is adjacent to the Sun Valley neighborhood, an often overlooked slice of the city with the lowest income residents, yet a thriving Chicano culture.

“Having a big venue in your neighborhood alienates the constituents that live there,” says Ben Opt Won Chavez, who works for a prison-reentry program that services Sun Valley, and lives in the area near the future Meow Wolf. “I’ve seen the foot traffic that Meow Wolf brings to their location in Santa Fe. There are just warehouses around there. They’re not impacting any neighborhood. I wish they could’ve picked a better location [in Denver]. That location was chosen because people assume it’s off the beaten path and won’t impact anyone, but just a few blocks away there’s the Sun Valley neighborhood, and I feel it’s gonna be a burden on them.”

“I think a lot of our community is most concerned for Sun Valley,” says Heffernan. “There is a strong sense of culture and diversity that’s been holding on for a very long time in one of [Denver’s] last low-income neighborhoods. Meow Wolf will most certainly attract many newcomers to an area that has been untouched for so long. I want to see everyone actively protecting the people who were there before so they are not systematically forced to relocate.”

The Meow Wolf project is only a fraction of the development projects that aim to revitalize the Sun Valley neighborhood, with public-private investment looking to reach over $500 million in the next decade.

Kadlubeck says that avoiding negative impacts on Sun Valley is a top priority for his team. “We have a four-person team in Denver focused exclusively on community outreach needs, and our top priority is Sun Valley. By summer of 2018, we look to have a first draft of our community impact strategy ready to share publicly, which will focus primarily on Sun Valley neighborhood.”

More than circumnavigating the negative impacts redevelopment can often have on a neighborhood, Meow Wolf says they have been engaged in a fight to reverse the tide of gentrification in Denver.

Following the deadly fire at Ghost Ship (the DIY venue/residence in Oakland, California), a multitude of Denver underground venues were collectively shut down by the city for various code violations. In January 2017, Meow Wolf immediately inserted itself into the dilemma.

“I heard from Meow Wolf that very same day,” says John Gross, musician and co-facilitator of the underground venue Rhinoceropolis, one of many unexpectedly hit with a bouquet of expensive infractions from the city. “It was a chaotic time. My roommates were crying and freaking out; there were the firemen, police, vice squad, reporters, it was a traumatic thing… Meow Wolf kept us afloat over the last year. We would’ve lost the lease without them.”

In response to the Ghost Ship fire, Meow Wolf created a $100,000 DIY fund to bring underground venues across the country up to code, donating a total of $500,000 to arts projects. “The city saw what we were doing and saw the positive PR and decided they also wanted to give money to Denver DIY spaces,” says Kadlubek. “Then they realized they can’t use tax-dollars for projects that are not up to code. So they gave us the money to distribute to venues of our choice through the DIY fund initiative. And that’s how we got into the middle of this whole thing.”

While Kadlubek believes communication between the DIY crowd and the city of Denver has become “the most progressive dialogue on this issue across the country,” he also acknowledges that “the venues don’t trust the city. And the city needs the venues to come forward and say who they are in order to get help getting up to code.”

Kadlubek acknowledges that underground venue operators including Rhinoceropolis have plenty of reasons to not trust the city, not least because red tape has prevented them from reopening despite extensive renovations.

“Meow Wolf can be mediators between city council and the arts scene,” says Katie Jane (not her real name), the operator of a DIY venue in Denver who is not yet comfortable outing itself to the city for fear of a shutdown. “But when it comes to gentrification, real-estate issues, affordability for artists, it’s beyond Meow Wolf’s reach. It doesn’t erase the distrust we have with city personnel, not yet. They can’t change the fact that a majority of Albus Brooks’s campaign contributions come from developers or bankers involved with development.”

In any conversation about gentrification in Denver, you’re likely to hear the name Albus Brooks. Director of the Denver City Council and author of the controversial “camping ban” which essentially criminalizes homelessness, Brooks oversees the warehouse district where Rhinoceropolis, and other underground venues, are located. Brooks has been central to a lot of the diplomatic efforts between the city and the underground art community.

His presence at the launch party for Meow Wolf Denver, which was populated with young artists who’d been evicted out of their homes in his district, made for an uncomfortable mix. At one point, Kalyn Heffernan approached him saying, “We don’t trust you,” and later delivered a message to Brooks that said, “We’re not going to stop heckling you until you start serving the fucking communities that you’re profiting from.”

Brooks is quick to admit that “there was a horrible response from the city when it comes to Rhinoceropolis.” Adding that “building trust with entrepreneurial artists is tough, but we’re in this for the long haul.”

For Kadlubek, achieving his goals of fair pay for artists, civility between underground arts and the city, and creating a model for how a major corporation can move into a neighborhood and do some good—or at the very least, not bleed it dry—all center around a single message: Art is valuable.

“Every day, corporate businesses that come into a city are realizing that having an authentic youth culture is valuable to their business, it’s valuable to their employees, it’s valuable to the quality of life in a city, it makes the city feel vibrant. And that vibrancy comes from art and diversity.”

At the same time, Kadlubek has no interest in preaching a corporate gospel to the crust-punk kids, nor does he think it necessarily would be a good idea if they followed in the footsteps of Meow Wolf.

“I think business is antithetical to the majority of DIY spaces,” he says. “That’s not the purpose of those spaces. It would be a shitty cultural landscape if everything was like Meow Wolf. There needs to be spaces that are agitating, and ambiguous in their identity. We want to be behind the scenes patrons of DIY, that can give those spaces better opportunity to thrive—but not to become a multimillion-dollar business.”

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It would be so much easier if we could bypass the body altogether and go straight to the source: Our brain. What if there were a better way than shoving something in our mouth, forcing it to travel all over our bloodstream, and blindly showering our brains with thousands of chemicals? What if we could, with the push of a button, make microscopic alterations of a few neurons, causing the happy chemicals to ring out in a jackpot celebration, with no side effects? Would we be ready to handle such complete control over our emotional reality?

The post There Is Now a Brain Implant that Can Control Emotions Wirelessly appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

As Petr Kucheryavyy scrolls through his Facebook feed, his iPhone spews out a string of unintelligible syllables, not unlike the sounds C-3PO made in Empire Strikes Back when Chewbacca screwed his head on backward. The words move way too fast for me to understand, but Kucheryavyy navigates his audio-based internet world with ease. Images appear on the screen, but he doesn’t see them: Kucheryavyy’s been blind since the age of nine.

“If you go to one of the conventions for the National Federation of the Blind, you’ll hear thousands of phones making these sounds,” he tells VICE. “Apple has figured out that if they build these things on the front end, and make them accessible, there is a giant community of people who will reimburse their investment.”

As Kucheryavyy explains this, a handful of students at the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) sit at computers with no monitors, wearing thick black “sleep masks” and headphones. It looks like a scene out of The Who’s Tommy, but instead of training to be pinball wizards, these students are learning how to navigate the internet while blind.

They are being trained on the Jaws Screen Reader, which converts words into speech as they use the arrow keys to manipulate the cursor, tapping through button after button on each page. Considering the deluge of information displayed on a given webpage, you can imagine the encyclopedic mass of words they go through just by checking their email, or reading a blog post. In some ways, these programs have been a godsend for the blind, granting them access to a universe of digital information that would’ve been inaccessible to them on a screen. However, many apps, websites, and social media pages are still not constructed with the blind in mind, and are often incompatible with the programs they use to get online.

“Blind folks are always behind on computer technology,” says Dan Burke, head of Academic and Youth Services for CCB, in an interview with VICE. “The internet is set up for the click of a mouse, but we have to go about things differently. The DOS-era of computers was great, because the screen readers worked well with the text user interface, but when everything became a graphic user interface, things became dicey.”

Kucheryavyy often sings the praises of Steve Jobs for making his products so accessible for the blind. In classic Apple fashion, their products have readers to assist the blind already built in. Jaws, however, is a separate accessory that must be purchased in addition to a computer—it can cost up to $900 and isn’t always compatible with all websites and operating systems.

Although Apple is a leader in helping the blind to access the internet today, it was Jobs who pioneered the graphic user interface that made computers more challenging for the visually impaired. Not to mention, he was on a mission for years to eliminate arrow keys—a primary tool for the blind—from all Apple computers. At the same time, Jobs had always been enamored with computers that could talk, evidenced as far back as the first Macintosh unveiling in 1984, where the computer introduced itself to the audience.

In 2007, when the iPhone first dropped, the blind community was locked out of the explosive smartphone trend, because the touch-screen was entirely sight-based. Previous cellphones always had a braille button on the center key, but the smooth glass surface of the iPhone left blind users with no way to navigate the device.

In response to an outcry from the blind community, Apple created the text to speech program VoiceOver for the iPhone 2, which has gone on to be one of the most celebrated tools for blind internet users, transforming the company from a target of criticism into a pioneer for accessibility. Apple now has accessibility tools on all of their devices, included at no extra charge. Though these features have earned praise from Stevie Wonder and the American Federation of the Blind, they are far from becoming a universal standard of blind technology.

“Jaws for Windows is made by Freedom Scientific, and they’re by far the most popular screen reader, probably 70 to 75 percent of the market,” says Chip Johnson, a technology instructor at CCB. “You can run into problems with Mac because app developers don’t always follow accessibility guidelines. Just because you have speech software, doesn’t mean that everything is going to be accessible. Sometimes you’ll buy an app and it will work great, but then you update it and the voiceover can’t read anything on the screen.”

For a blind person on the internet, app updates are a source of dread and anxiety.

“With every other Facebook update, I can’t use it,” says Kucheryavyy. “And it can be days, weeks or months before they fix it. The other night I needed an Uber at 2 AM, but the app wouldn’t let me use it until I updated it, and once I did it was inaccessible. It happens frequently.”

With Facebook, blind users will often find themselves switching back and forth from a Mac with VoiceOver, to a PC with Jaws, to a smartphone mobile app, trying to find one that is compatible, in that moment, with the latest updates. Kucheravyy says he goes through this same process with LinkedIn, where one portion of the website works on a PC, and others work on his iPhone. Then there are portions of LinkedIn that aren’t accessible on either one.

“We’re in a time period where you’re going to see more of a push for Americans with Disabilities Act standards to be applied to the internet,” says Kucheravvy.

Enacted in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibited a number of discriminations against those with disabilities, thereby forcing all retailers to make accommodations for the blind (and others) inside their stores. The internet was hardly the place of commerce in 1990 that it is today, so there was little foresight given to extending ADA standards onto the web at the time.

That began to change in 2006 when the National Federation of the Blind sued Target because their website wasn’t accessible to the blind. One of the plaintiffs in the suit cited a common problem with websites that aren’t compatible with screen readers, saying that when he tried to click on a Dyson vacuum cleaner he was looking to buy, the reader described the product as “Link GP browse dot html reference zero six zero six one eight nine six three eight one eight zero seven two nine seven three five 12 million 957 thousand 121.”

The case was settled two years later, with Target agreeing to pay $6 million to the plaintiffs, alongside $3.7 million in attorney’s fees.

In 2010, the NFB and the American Council for the Blind represented a student from Arizona State University, who sued the school over a pilot program involving the use of Kindle e-book readers in the classroom. The Kindle did have an audio function that translates text to speech, but in order to activate it, the user must first navigate a series of visual-based menu options. The lawsuit was settled with no damages or attorney’s fees sought by the plaintiffs, and Amazon promised to make the Kindle more accessible to the blind.

“For a long time the unanswered question has been whether websites that operate as businesses but don’t have a physical store—like Amazon—are the kinds of businesses that the Americans with Disabilities Act can address,” says Mark Richert, Director of Public Policy for the American Foundation for the Blind. “In the Target lawsuit, the court said that anything that you can do online that you can also do in the store, that’s the extent that the website must be accessible to people with disabilities. And anything [outside of retail] need not be accessible.”

Richert also cites a case against Netflix wherein a federal judge ruled that the web-based company was legally bound to ADA standards, as well as a California state law that offers no distinction between physical and internet businesses when it comes to disability laws.

“With Netflix and the iPhone, those are mostly for fun, where things get a little more sober is when it comes to Health technology,” says Richert. “If everything is online, and visually impaired people cannot access or use their [healthcare websites], then they can’t read their health records, or manage their health insurance, or communicate with their doctor. These are pretty significant barriers.”

Throughout my time at the Colorado Center for the Blind, independence was a subject strongly emphasized by every instructor I talked to. Being able to navigate the world on your own terms is essential to building confidence in the blind. At CCB, students work with power saws, cook large meals, and are dropped alone in unfamiliar parts of Denver, expected to find their way home by only asking one person a single question, without the aid of a smartphone.

“Some people have low expectations of blind people, and are surprised when we can feed ourselves, or get on the bus,” says Burke. “They think blind people are unaware of their environment, that because you can’t see things you’re therefore lost. But the best way to come to terms with being a blind person is to know that you don’t have to change your life. You may not be able to drive a car, but it doesn’t mean you can’t go downtown, or work in a job that forces you to rely on technology.”

“I’ve noticed that some blind people depend on their iPhones a lot,” says Chris Parsons, a technology instructor at CCB. Parsons often warns her students not to become too dependent on smartphones, since the apps can at times be unreliable, and because some students will use voice to text messaging and not bother to correct the inevitable errors of the words.

“Technology in a way is a beautiful thing for blind people because we get a chance to access a computer, or scan paper and read documents [through optical character recognition software and text readers],” says Kucheryavyy. “But on the other end, we’re suffering because the people who are using the same technology are distancing themselves in a personal way, in my opinion. Technology has been terrible for personal socialization. You get this environment on the street where they don’t communicate with you, if somebody is walking toward you, a simple ‘Hello, good morning,’ that would allow a blind person in a noisy environment to navigate around you. But we don’t say hi to each other. We’re so busy on our phones.”

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