“we have too much of truth and that we are looking for the exact opposite, something unspeakable, essentially irreducible to the all-encircling semiotic of capital – a way out, a cloud of unknowing. Speaking in signs is all we can do; so we adorn ourselves with arcane sigils, weave myths of fallen gods, raise deconstructed chants to the beats of synthetic drums – anything to break free, but somehow we keep coming back, orbiting the same unbreakable truth, again and again, running in never-ending circles.”
Believing things takes a lot of energy. You can measure the fragility of a system by the energy it takes to believe in it. Or alternately, how believable it is at non-striving slacker energy levels. Good systems are 80% believable at 2o% peak energy level.
“Why a rotary cellphone? Because in a finicky, annoying, touchscreen world of hyperconnected people using phones they have no control over or understanding of, I wanted something that would be entirely mine, personal, and absolutely tactile,while also giving me an excuse for not texting.”
Have you ever seen a clearer rebuttal to late capitalism’s insistence on private individuals changing their behavior to solve systemic ailments? https://t.co/O2Cex2mswW
Hauntology was not an ‘end of history’ concept, but a diagnosis of an economic, political dismantling of the ability for the future to be culturally produced. There is therefore a role for strategists to create new models of infrastructure to allow now possibilities
sorry but jordan peterson writing a book prescribing “rules for life” then almost dying in a russian hospital from benzo withdrawals and an insane all-beef diet not even two years later is one of the funniest things to ever happen
People love to criticize approaches to climate change, an unprecedented global issue, but rarely want to implement approaches themselves—because they expose themselves to criticism. If you’re going to do this work, you have to have an earnest desire to co-learn—& lots of humility
This is a wireless antenna in California. Network coverage was disrupted by an Acorn woodpecker, a 3 ounce bird stashing an estimated 35-50 gallons/300lbs of acorns. pic.twitter.com/QYdp6ShxXZ
Imagine instead of a winner take all political competition we decided on what each person can best contribute—their superpower—and made their role to do it.
“No matter how the official narrative of this turns out, […] these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep” (Pynchon, BE 322).
No sniffers, no trackers, no GDPR, no ads, no cookies, no data collection, no marketing, no mailing list, no donation box, no scraping, no terms & conditions, no permission, no money. Who you are and what you do are no business of ours. #ubuweb
love the absolute eldritch wierdness of the Nike air zoom viperfly, enhanced by the fact its already banned for use in Tokyo 2020 despite coming out this week, so v few will ever see retail. Lovecraftian form factor in order to get the vaporfly plate into a running spike shoe pic.twitter.com/Cz9mnrc10B
It’s true: We’ve written a book! How to Future is a practical guide to applied futuring for non-specialists, coming from Kogan Page this July. Sense, map, model and communicate new futures. Pre-order now, RT and stay tuned for more here, @howtofuture or https://t.co/Qk8PEPil3epic.twitter.com/kcqGrHhG5z
Best ever basil grown through this apocalyptic summer. So in the 2050s I imagine it will be all caprese salad but with jellyfish instead of mozzarella 😘 #climatechange#canberrapic.twitter.com/sIoSPYg5Fr
the bishop of orlando is also the bishop of the moon, due to a canon law that says “any newly discovered territory would fall under the bishopric from whence the discovering expedition departed”. his is therefore the largest catholic diocese, at over 14,000,000 square miles
99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route! #googlemapshackshttps://t.co/3gixMxopE6pic.twitter.com/6KcMm1XgAF
Douglas Rushkoff: “"I was deeply resentful of Wired for repackaging the Mondo universe as this kind of NASDAQ business story. And it was just obvious to me what they were doing. And the extent to which they either explicitly or implicitly discredited the real cyber movement…”
I’m gonna talk with world religion leaders with the Vatican real soon, and my wish is we make a document that radically alters what “apocalypse” means. Basically,
APOCALYPSE NO!
i asked some trees how they’d manage the massive and rapid transition away from fossil fuels in a just and equitable way and they just stood there https://t.co/N2Zm6g8OCg
Speculative Design: the present is boring and predictable. The past is complex and a burden. Fiction is comfortable and cool, a temporary place to seek shelter. Over and over again.
Note: You probably don’t know enough about telecommunications infrastructure, investment regulation, internet security, cyber-intelligence, and the 5 Eyes intelligence sharing network to hold as strong an opinion as you’re currently considering putting forth.
This is an amazing realization: all online multiplayer first person shooters are “just conferences calls with occasional shooting” and now I see WebEx completely differently https://t.co/Hr66KKxBT0
If you believe Australians will change their attitude because of the catastrophe, read first Ian Kirshaw “The End” on the last year of the war 1945: everyone knows the Reich is doomed, yet they stick to the regime until the 1st US tanks enter their town. Except this time, no US!
Large-scale physics experiments, or “sites that are incredibly evocative, religious in their belief that an unseen world is capable of revelation, but scientific in their insistence that this unveiling will be achieved through technological means.” https://t.co/xWOvzb8Lv9pic.twitter.com/14soyNTpXD
2094: Scientists discover that Trout Mask Replica, Neutral Milk Hotel, Tokyo Anal Dynamite are deeply embedded What3Words coordinates to portals through which the Pilgrims will ascend to the hell planes. It begins.
People thought they were building Star Trek’s computer but didn’t realize they were building Douglas Adams’ Sirius Cybernetics computers, because he accurately observed that the Marketing Department exists
“We don’t play music in order to get somewhere. I mean, if the objective of music were to arrive at a point, say the last bar, the final great crashing pause of the symphony, well than all we’d do we’d be just hurry up it’s playing, play it as fast as possible so as to get to the culmination as soon as possible. Or, just cut out the whole symphony and play only the last bars.”
“There is no longer a spectacle to contemplate from the security provided by the interior of a (magical) circle; now, the natural and the supernatural come together in a no - place, an environment, an atmosphere in which the characters immerse themselves, a sinister ether of unknown dimensions. The centre of the circle is already everywhere, and its circumference is nowhere.”
Looking fwd to this “slithery philosophical filibuster and experiential scrum”, where @zzkt & I will share our oblique insights, animist techniques & occult ways of doing business @_foam (that helped us survive several tech bubbles, economic crises and other contingencies).
‘The buildings and the instruments at Aragats remain, like ghost ships in the cosmic rain … [waiting] for news that could change the universe: a quantum bullet more powerful than humans can produce, or weirder than their tentative laws can explain.’ https://t.co/Yc6S01Hwmk
When you get near 100% confident in a belief, you internalize it, which means it sinks into the unconscious. To hold a belief consciously is to hold it with non-trivial amounts of doubt. The doubt level of stuff you say tends to be matched. We rarely mix confidence levels.
Here’s one weird trick for improving your life and your politics: whenever you’re ready to condemn or degrade someone, ask yourself, “What can I learn from them?”
— Quinn Norton should be writing right now (@quinnnorton) January 20, 2020
I keep coming back to the Challenger tragedy’s NASA/Norton safety/probability/risk vs political “must-launch” culture, and comparing it to Boeing’s safety/probability/risk vs cost-cutting “must-ship” culture
Oh damn this arrived a lot quicker than expected! Had already highlighted a bunch of pdfs to pieces but nice to be able to read the rest on paper. Looks good @futurystpic.twitter.com/xsSR9AgQXe
Zoöp news, Feb 21st at @NieuweInstituut we will be running a new & improved version of our narrative-immersed workshop Zoönomic Futures, “an immersive training programme aimed at developing a practical ethics for a society that is no longer human-centric”: https://t.co/XIvsyL29cS
Today in #writing: things which unclog the creative flow.
1. Music
I create playlists for each book to set the mood. That’s more helpful than it sounds. It not only blocks street noise, it also becomes pavlovian - I hear the music and immediately feel ready to work.
“Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay” (Deleuze & Guattari, ATP 56).
Not sure what’s funnier (and more punk) - the fact that this high-tech clamp replacement was defeated by heated windows and a credit card, or that people then jacked its GPS function to get themselves free internet. https://t.co/4z0OUWFY7i
Cool, this will be a nice distraction: scientists create “Xenobots”, new lifeforms grown from living cells, “completely biological machines from the ground up”…
But wait, what’s this: “They can organise themselves spontaneously & collectively”… 😱https://t.co/jrhS3xImWe
