Cassandrafreude (n). the bitter pleasure of things going wrong in exactly the way you predicted, but no one believed you when it could have made a difference.
I’ve finally discovered the word that describes how nearly every climate scientist feels, h/t @fretmistress.
“Every photograph is an act amid a complex structure of choices. These choices, which extend beyond the time of the photograph, influence the photograph before, during and after its instant. Reading photographs in context is a participation in this complex”
–Between The Eyes. Essays on Photography and Politics. David Levi Strauss
Early in the crisis, the Right to Repair campaign came into its own, as hospitals - all of us! - found themselves in the same position as farmers (R2R’s staunchest advocates): isolated, far from parts and service, with urgent needs that could not wait.
Right from the start, the folks at Ifixit were on the case, putting out an open call for the repair and service manuals that hospital techs have long squirreled away and traded in secret for fear of reprisals from manufacturers:
That, after all, is medtech’s dirty secret: despite manufacturers’ claims that their products can’t be safely serviced without their consent (and without paying them), hospitals have ALWAYS fixed their own gear, because the alternative is letting people die.
It was manufacturers who were endangering patients, by making it harder for technicians laboring under time-pressure to save human lives to get the information they needed. No wonder state officials started demanding respirator repair guides.
Hospital technicians answered Ifixit’s call for repair manuals, opening up their secret hard-drives and inundating the service with more manuals than they could handle, so they enlisted The Maintainers and the American Library Association to help organize them.
Today, Ifixit’s Medical Device Repair portal is open and thriving, with manuals for repairing a vast array of medical equipment, during the pandemic and beyond.
They’re reversing the trend of deadly information hoarding. As Paul Kelley of Fremont’s Washington Hospital told Wired’s Lauren Goode: “We can do less and less work on equipment. We’re getting less and less documentation. Training is getting harder, and parts are getting scarcer.”
Predictably, the medtech lobbyists at Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance is warning that this will put people in danger - I suppose their answer is that if an authorized technician isn’t available, we should ensure patient safety by letting them die.
Home Computers is a new book tracing the industrial design of PCs in the 1970s and 1980s, AKA, the Cambrian explosion era, with some of the 1990s’ best designs as well.
Thanks to Scott Smith from @changeist for his talk for the #ArtScienceAtHome online conference, Feeling The Future. In it he introduced practical tools for mapping possible futures in a crisis.
two months of direct, viral instruction in the illusory unreality of the autonomous, self-contained, independent western individual. no wonder americans are losing their minds.
hey ‘being open to uncertainty’ is not a motivational quote or a meme but an actual rigorous, and quite exhausting practice that requires holding multiple possibilities simultaneously and being able to see connections between these possibilities and not retreating from the ache
Flying Fortress:“When eko asked me to write an article for him & ekosystem.org on the topic “
Self-Isolation - Tips From An Artist“ I mused a bit like: OK I have already jumped on all these „regular activities/projects“ - we put up our „Juke Box Coloring Book“ for free download (still up here ), I also sent in some more black’n’white drawings for similar projects and we released an „art puzzle“ with Affenfaust gallery to help people’s pastime.
So it was time to write something unusual and share a special view on one of my other hobbies…”
How To: Mushroom In Your Room
Since we moved with family into a little town-house last year I am just happy now to have a little garden to do all this spring planting and gardening to kill some of the extra time at home while quarantine lockdown. But even before I started to do some gardening during wintertime inside.
I started to grow mushrooms. The legal ones. Oyster mushrooms and suchlike.
Why? It’s just amazing! Everything about it!
It’s easy. It’s tasty homegrown food. They grow fast, like you can look twice a day and you gonna see significant growing happening! You can up-cycle your used coffee-grounds as substrate (or use dead wood or straw). So your organic waste turns into some new groceries! Brilliant!
Search online for a dealer (e.g. Germany: pilzpaket.de ) who is providing different starter-sets of mycelium (the „real mushroom; not the „fruits“ we colloquially generalize as „mushrooms“). It’s not even expansive.
When you start planting the mycelium on your “coffee soil“ in a pot it’s just important to work sterile - like washing your hands properly or using disposable gloves (ah come on, you should be trained on this already due to „the situation”, right?).
I am not taking this to deep in details. You should get an instruction sheet with all details together in any starter-kit (or go online).
Just again: it’s really easy. And it’s fun.
Within 3 weeks you should get your first harvest from your mushroom. Ready to cook.
See my documentary photos from my personal first experience in growing oyster mushrooms in my kitchen on top of the wall units (not in sunlight on the windowsill!).
And now comes the extra clue: after 1-2 waves of harvest you can split the „worn out“ mushroom into 2 pieces and start the whole thing over again in two bowls with new soil. So you basically double your mycelium/mushrom. And double… quadruple…and so on. It’s a bit the same as like kefir (just a mushroom in milk) or sourdough (for baking bread). You can share a bowl of mycelium with your friends so they can also start growing their own mushrooms.
Hoping this little article might has caught your interest!
Start growing. Take care & stay safe!
FÖRTRESS
“Recently I was asked by a Finnish foundation to write an article aiming to explain to artists what it would mean not to fly to their residencies, called Slow Travel – A Privilege Not A Sacrifice, describing a 3-day journey from rural France to the Saari Residence in Finland, using trains, electric scooters and ships. Within weeks of it being published, artists were either unable to travel to residencies or were stuck in the ones that they were in, because of the restrictions of movement caused by COVID 19. It seems ironic in hindsight that one of the conclusions I drew was “that having travelled by rail and ship many times in one year, I’m also beginning to question the need to travel at all. Slow travel doesn’t mean just substituting a train for a plane, it means changing an entire mindset.” I go on to ask the question “why travel at all?”. Little did I know. Now we have ‘home artists residencies’ and are bewildered by an online melée of endless virtual meetings, remote cocktail parties and non-stop media consumption, what will happen in Europe when we finally get let out?“
I suppose one of the things this makes obvious is a collective inability to conceptualise, or narrate, the reality of a chronic, durational, massively distributed and avoidable catastrophic death event.
You know what would be worse. A weird anticorona virus that forced us to always be in tight huddles always with 6 people less than 6 feet away. In crowds of minimum 50. Except to go to the bathroom. Social closening. That sounds horrifying.
Neoclassical economics claims that “greed is good”—by following one’s own self-interest, “all boats rise.” Unfortunately, we have evidence—from biology to anthropology to sociology to economics—that it simply isn’t true. Only through pro-social, cooperative behavior can we all thrive. It’s time to put these principles into practice as we collectively tackle Coronavirus.
Allison starts by drawing the crucical distinction between “open source” (you can see the inner workings of the code) and “software freedom” (you can exercise technological self-determination), and explores the many ways that the former has eclipsed the latter.
From “tivoization” (where a vendor uses DRM to prevent users from modifying the code on the products they own) to moving everything to the cloud, where the underlying source code can’t be modified except by the cloud’s owners.
He describes how “open source” was a technocratic proposition, concerned with giving hackers technological self-determination while leaving users behind to take whatever they’re given - and how the failure of software licensing takes away self-determination even for hackers.
It reminds me powerfully of Mako Hill’s absolutely crucial 2018 Libreplanet keynote on the way that corporations have figured out how to use open source to hoard all the software freedom, while taking it away from the rest of us.
Allison excoriates software freedom orgs - like FSF and The Software Freedom Conservancy - for their focus on licenses, saying that licenses only really work for business-to-business negotiations, and are all but useless to individuals who lack wherewithal to sue big companies.
Instead, Allison calls for a focus on protocol documentation, saying that in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.
I’m not entirely convinced; I think protocol documentation is incredibly imporant and agree with the analysis of the limitations of licenses and the rapacious hoarding of software freedom through DRM and cloud computing.
Protocol documentation will do something to address these, but not enough. There’s a legal side to this, and while Allison explicitly says that he’s more interested in engineering approaches than legal ones, there are limits to the engineering-only approach.
The reason that companies are able to resist license enforcement, and the reason that their enclosure of software commons is so effective, is that tech has become monopolized by a handful of firms, and they attained that monopoly through anticompetitive acts.
The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them.
These rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since. Now, we have the an internet made of five giant services filled with screenshots of the other four.
The reason that companies adopted software freedom even before open source came along was their terror of competitors who might take away their customers by offering more freedom to them. Today, that terror has been eliminated, thanks to monopolization.
Facebook is losing millions of users every year…to Instagram.
The incredible profits created by monopolies allow Big Tech firms to create new legal weapons - new laws and new interpretations of existing law - that allow them to punish people who make interoperable products without permission.
This legal power to block Adversarial Interoperability is one of the critical ways that Big Tech maintains its monopolies. I think Allison’s analysis of the practical limitations of licenses is spot on.
But interop isn’t just a matter of documentation, there’s a crucial legal dimension to it as well.
“In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The results were not what they expected.”
“Seligman struggled to impose meaning on his unusual archive. When he tried to establish universalities, exceptions and contradictions proliferated. And when he tried to draw sharp distinctions between the minds of Britons on the one hand, and colonial subjects on the other, commonalities asserted themselves. Even in a situation where researchers held all the power – with the authority of the imperial state behind them, and an elaborate theoretical structure setting the terms of the encounter – their subjects did not always follow the script.”
“Did colonial officials get what they wanted from these growing collections of Freudian data? Some results, to be sure, ended up in tendentious arguments portraying anticolonial politics as the product of mental illness. The language of ‘frustration-aggression’ reactions and ‘deculturation’ disorders allowed some British officials to suggest that calls for independence derived from inchoate expressions of anger and immaturity. Once again, however, a clear-cut vindication of empire through expert knowledge proved elusive. The same studies that furnished evidence of indigenous pathology could not avoid pointing to the damage inflicted by British rule: the crushing racial hierarchies, the lack of economic opportunities, the weirdly Anglocentric schooling. Some researchers even suggested that imperialism, not anticolonial nationalism, was the real mental disorder; they explained the behaviour of British colonialists in terms of status anxieties, sexual hang-ups, and feelings of insecurity.”
