Good time to be a futurist. Since all old futures have been trashed there’s demand for building up a whole new set of futures. Most futurists will fail though since they were trained in adjacent possible variational futures, not blank-modes futures.
— Venkatesh “sergeant mode” Rao (@vgr) May 2, 2020
One of the best conferences I’ve attended is Re:publica in Berlin, which manages to both attract and criticize the tech industry. This year’s conference is (obviously) online only, and I was honored to be asked to record a keynote for it.
My talk is called “The Collapse: How institutions, trust and truth are annihilated by monopoly and corruption.” It’s on May 7 at 8:25 Berlin time.
“The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.”
“Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.”
“Another problematic aspect of Western figure of the tool-making animal is the confounding of media with technology. Machines that process texts, images, and sounds, I contend, are significantly distinct from machines that act on materials like wood and iron. However important these mechanical machines are, they are very different and have very different implications from information machines. Media machines act on the components of culture, not nature (if that distinction may still be employed), affecting human beings in a way very different from the mechanical machines. One might say that information machines are closer to humans than mechanical machines and establish relations with them that are more profound.”
— Flusser, Vilém.Into the Universe of Technical Images 1985. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
This is almost as bad as the class I ran a decade ago when one student wrote a custom particle filter from scratch and another one submitted a HASKELL COMPILER. How the hell am I supposed to assign numbers to these things?
The Creation of the Humanoids and the Sins of the Fleshapoids in a Still Life avec le péché dans la riviere For Whom Mind is Outer Space and Eternity is a Long Time. pic.twitter.com/RAdycIcdFB
What’s more, they’ve got an advanced suite of tools for searching and downloading these images. It’s a really impressive technical and cultural achievement.
But there’s a fly in the ointment (more than one).
First, the museum takes the position that these public domain works acquire a new copyright once someone makes a high-quality photo of them. They have chosen a very restrictive CC license (CC BY-NC-SA).
This is wrong as a matter of UK law, as the UK Intellectual Property Office has stated:
“Copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’.”
Beyond that, the museum’s claim to be the sole commercial exploiter of these works is a bad look, given how much of its collection was stolen - looted - from colonized lands.
“When we stole these artifacts, it was culture. When you sell our pictures, that’s theft.”
I’m very sympathetic to the museum’s imperatives. They are struggling through both a decade of Tory austerity and a once-in-a-century economic apocalypse, so obviously they want to hold onto any revenue-generating possibilities they can find.
But the museum’s long-term survival can’t depend on philanthropists - plutes are dilettantes and most of the time they’re not actually “giving,” they’re just laundering their reputations.
Nor can it rely on monopolizing the sale of t-shirts and postcards with photos of looted artifacts on them. That’ll bring in pennies, while they need millions.
The future of museums - of the public sector overall - is public support. It’s only through broad public recognition of the social value of museums and other cultural institutions that they can once again attain stable, long-term financing.
And one way to do that is to make the museum a daily part of Britons’ lives - say, by allowing crafters and artists to make and sell works derived from the collection, by not placing restrictions on the high-quality reproductions the museum commissions.
“Friends will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no friends” goes double for museums and other cultural institutions.
Without the political will that comes from being treasured by the public, the trajectory of these institutions is to eventually become entirely dependent on rich donors, who have no reason to fund or maintain them as public bodies.
Not when those treasures will look ever so much nicer in their summer homes.
How could administration become a site for action and intervention, radical histories, dark arts, wild experiments, new collectivities and meaningful work?
Everybody is sure their predicted future has arrived.
So you now live in a socialist libertarian authoritarian statist ancap monarchist democracy with high-tech Stone Age apocalyptic dysto-utopian Chinese characteristics.
All you need to do is create a polar coordinate system that places 1 pole in say palembang. Then project that to Cartesian and voila. I don’t know why cartographers chose north and south poles to base their maps.
Great Britain has ~60 million inhabitants and four native languages (English, Gàidhlig, Scots, and Welsh).
Sumatra’s muuuuuch bigger in area, has almost as many people (~58 million), and somewhere around 50 native languages (Malay, Minang, Acehnese, Gayo, Lampung, Rejang…).
The other day someone told me about a program that will generate scenes to match a text description. I’m always excited to test out algorithms like this because the task of “draw anything a human asks for” is so hard that even state-of-the-art results are hilariously bad.
I tried a few test prompts.
“Nicest alien wants to say hi”
“The end of the world”
“A planetarium full of marbles”
Depending on what you ask for, it can seem for a while like maybe the neural net is doing well. But then you get to results like this:
“Horse riding a bicycle”
“Tyrannosaurus eating pizza”
Why does it sometimes generate something that’s a halfway recognizable attempt at completely the wrong thing?
I think I figured it out. Look at this series of images.
Triceratops, Tree frog, Hourglass, Fireplace… It’s matching every prompt with a vaguely similar word.
And because I’ve played a lot with image-generating neural nets, I even recognized the categories: they’re all from Fei-Fei Li’s famous ImageNetproject. So if a phrase isn’t already an ImageNet category (like “horse on a bicycle”), this program looks for its closest match - in this case, it seems to have gone for “house finch” so it’s going for similarity in spelling rather than in meaning. “The end of the world” turned into “hen of the woods”, a type of large ruffled mushroom. I’m not sure why “tyrannosaurus eating a pizza” seems to have turned into “measuring cup”. The “nicest alien” is slightly easier to explain, since there are a LOT of dog categories in ImageNet so chances are decent a given phrase will match to a dog.
Here’s an interesting one: “God”
There’s no “God” category in ImageNet, but there is one for “hog”.
As far as I can tell, this demo’s not being used anywhere other than this one weird demo site, so there’s no harm in it being blissfully, weirdly wrong about stuff. But it does give me a small satisfaction to think that I may have figured out HOW it’s being so vividly wrong. Still puzzling about that tyrannosaurus rex, though.
Bonus material: I’ve collected a few more examples of prompts + results, some of which I find really baffling. You can enter your email here, and I’ll send them to you.
You can explore some of the ImageNet categories (and even mix them together, or compute the opposite of guacamole) using Artbreeder.com (the “general” image type). If you figure out what some of these mystery phrases mapped to, please tell me in the comments!
“Plastic words are not new in how they look but in how they are used. They have been fashioned for the purpose of laying down the tracks and outlining the routes of a civilization that is covering the globe with gathering speed. Their origins can no longer be discerned. They resemble one another. It is as though there were a place somewhere in the world where these words were being released at intervals, as though at an unknown place there existed a factory releasing them complete from its assembly line, or as if they were coming into being simultaneously in many different places.”
— Uwe Pörksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language
Two pandas are formed by solar panels at the Panda Green Energy power plant in Datong, Shanxi Province, northern China. Built in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program, this solar farm covers roughly 1,500 acres and includes an education center that teaches children about sustainable and renewable energy.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
“Before I propose a more formal analysis of what toys are, I have to admit that I am fascinated by the completeness of procedural toys and how they operate as alterity machines. Procedural toys are mesmerizing because they are frames of the otherness, because they are tiny worlds that operate by their own condition.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
Progress Bar S02E08
Scenario 8 of 8: May 27, 2091
Nieuw London KKKollapsss
It’s May 27, 2091.
Nieuw London, a Royal Dutch Shell Holo-City zapped into G-drive. Kamixlo doesn’t want to go, moaning “oh woe is post-capitalist desire!” Fisher Man’s Friends. Juha doesn’t even remember the C-phase, “Kapital” they called it, before the KKKollapsss. Après moi, only wetlands and wastelands, Techno-Tropen Islands, Lyzza’s Babylon 2.0. Bambii insists we have entered autonomous pleasure communalism at the century’s end, but Endgame sees it all as 𝖒𝖆𝖑𝖊 𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖘𝖎𝖊𝖘.
‘The village [of Kepuh] on Java island has deployed a cast of “ghosts” to patrol the streets, hoping that age-old superstition will keep people indoors and safely away from the coronavirus.’ https://t.co/JHgeDCjTPapic.twitter.com/umP1kn7WbZ
Yes, I know Rome is burning. I feel a coward for ducking away from the topic in public speech, but I find myself still with nothing to say. Is there solidarity in sharing the same, self-evident truths as everyone else, or is it a hollow posture?
NEW: It took four years but I just got some newly declassified CIA reports studying the Soviet Union’s use of “black magic”, telepathic mind control and “psychotronic generators” – devices they said turned people into psychics and let them move objects with their minds. #FOIApic.twitter.com/MU7ogeaCGJ
— Emma Best 🏳️🌈 🏴 (Mx. Yzptlk) (@NatSecGeek) April 13, 2020
#COVID19#RIPConway John Conway was a cross between Archimedes, Jagger and Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries.https://t.co/2oPsRIrVompic.twitter.com/lw4521AWqo
“Mechanical toys, as well as autonomous toys, hold a different promise, a different type of fascination. The mechanical toy and its close relative, the procedural toy (understood in a narrow sense as those mechanical toys implemented with computers and focused on simulating systems), are paradoxical objects that put their users in the double role of performer and voyeur. Mechanical and procedural toys are fascinating because they don’t require us; they seem to be playing on their own. We play with them to see how they behave, how they react. Sim City is a magnificent spectacle, a toy that can operate on its own while tempting us to tinker with its parameters to both see and understand what happens — and all the while, creating a feeling of otherness, a playful microcosm that we, as observers and tinkerers, want not to inhabit but to observe.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
“The difference between technology and magic is that technology works regardless of whether you believe in it or not.”
“So computers are magic?”
“Computers are magic.”
“Not all “toys” are created as toys. One of the most fascinating capacities of humans is being able to toy around with almost any object they can find. From pebbles to tree branches, to more complex technological objects, humans seem to enjoy playing with things, turning them in ways other than those expected, intended, or recommended. We use our hands, our body, to appropriate an object and explore its functionalities and meaning in ways often unexpected.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
If you own a rice cooker, Taiwan’s FDA made a PSA stating that you can put your disposable PPE or mask in your rice cooker (with no water) and set it to steam for three minutes to sterilize it and re-use.
“Funnily enough, it’s not comforting to be told that you have to go into battle with your disease, like some kind of medieval knight on a romantic quest… The idea that illness is a character test, with recovery as a reward for the valiant, is glib to the point of insult.”
Word of the Day: “glisk"––sunlight glimpsed through a break in the clouds; a fleeting glance at a glittering sight; a brief glow of warmth from a fire that’s burned low; a sudden flash of hope in the heart. (Scots)
Photograph by Michael Held pic.twitter.com/0w6Jl7YFCz
Late last year, Propublica published a deep, blockbuster investigation into the use of brutal “discipline” techniques in Illinois’s special ed classes, some of them so extreme as to qualify as torture.
These techniques, including physically restraining children and locking them in small isolation rooms, sometimes for whole days, or even for whole consecutive days, had been strictly limited or eliminated altogether in the rest of the US, but not in Illinois.
Instead, Illinois had passed a rule requiring schools to document the use of force against children with learning disabilities. As a result, Propublica was able to FOIA thick sheaves of handwritten notes documenting children’s pleas for release at mandated 15-min intervals.
It was real Banality of Evil stuff, and it shed light on mysterious broken bones and bruises that parents had been told were self-inflicted. In the ensuing scandal, the state banned the use of these techniques, finally catching up with the rest of the nation, 20 years on.
Thanks to intense lobbying from Illinois private schools, notably Giant Steps and Markland Day School, and the public A.E.R.O Special Education Cooperative, some of the physical restraint tactics were reinstated.
Notably, face-down restraint - a tactic banned in 30+ states due to the high risk of asphyxiation - is once again permitted in special ed programs.
We can thank Rep Jim Durkin [R-82] for this. He sits on Giant Steps’s board along with 5 former colleagues from state government.
His chief of staff was an ardent advocate for reinstating face-down restraint in Illinois schools. He declined to comment to Propublica.
“… like a modern lab technician ensconced within a biohazard suit, the basilisk maker should never undertake this experiment without first donning a protective suit of mirrors.”
A massive bloom of cyanobacteria is visible in the Baltic Sea. This Overview was featured in latest feature about cruise ships – link below to see the full story.
This area receives roughly 300 cruise ships each year and wastewater dumped by ships contains nitrogen and phosphorous that has been proven to feed these blooms. Large blooms can cause an oxygen-depleted dead zone where other organisms cannot survive.
Arundhati Roy: “The pandemic is a portal … we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”
This drone shot shows a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy. The blue-grey marble extracted from this region is widely used in sculpture, like Michelangelo’s David, and in building decor like that of The Pantheon. With more than 650 active or abandoned quarry sites, more marble has been extracted here than any other place on Earth.
This pandemic rly highlights how we’re globally dependent but locally loyal. Whereas I’d prefer if we were locally dependent & globally loyal. Now, more urgently than ever, we need to act as a planet, as a whole.
— MΞMO (isolated. as usual. but washing hands more) (@memotv) April 4, 2020
“Your problem is not as unique as you think. You have more data than you think. You need less data than you think. An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.”
I’ve hardly left the flat for weeks but days are a series of staggered, overlapping meetings. like being haunted by a large cohort of polite, well-organised ghosts.
The purpose of crisis prep is not to see you through any imaginable crisis but to buy you time. Applies to both resources (financial and non) and intellectual (scenarios, contingency plans). The stockpile running out is fine. Wasting the time it bought you is not.
Shout out to all the partners of lab researchers who have endured the recent exasperated crash course on antiviral biosecurity! Thread with pointers follows if you haven’t been so lucky. 1/12
— Dave Griffiths (FoAM Kernow) (@nebogeo) April 2, 2020
Taiwan did not beat coronavirus because of Confucianism. Full stop. They are doing well because their Vice President is an epidemiologist with previous experience with SARS and they have a strong public health sector with an emergency command centre.
“To keep things organized, Mr. Cavalcanti established a subgroup of 130 people who operate on Slack and filter through the information that amasses by the minute, building a catalog of open-source solutions for medical supplies as they go. (Version 1.1 of the guide was released on March 20.)According to Mr. Cavalcanti, moderators flag designs that are posted in the main group. A team of medical professionals evaluates the flagged content. Then, a documentation group puts the approved information together in read-only Google documents, creating a virtual library that details equipment including exam gloves, face masks, negative pressure rooms and oxygen masks.”
