I reblog this every time I see it for those two sharks that look like they’re absolutely
dishingabout the last several million years.
Several million years ago, when I was in high school, I made a DnD setting with
Paraceratheriumin it. Because I was young and foolish and ignorant of player behavior, I had stats for if you fought one, but put no thought into what would happen if you tried to ride one or keep it as a pet.
How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth
ALT
It’s a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind
you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.
These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: “Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism,” published in last month’s
European Journal of International Relations:
The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes “wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers” who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept’s wealth. It also includes “second citizenship managers and lawyers” that facilitate the klept’s transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world’s greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they’ve drained dry back home.
Excerpt from this story from
Anthropocene Magazine:
Emotions around climate change—grief, fear, hope, guilt, anger, and so on—are becoming a more frequent topic of conversation among the public, as well as a focus of interest among researchers. Of these various emotions, anger has received relatively little research attention until now.
Anger can be a destructive force, inspiring vengeance and punishment, but it can also be a force for good—inspiring people to work together to overcome and redress injustices. Does that hold in the case of climate change?
To find out more about climate anger and its effects, researchers analyzed data from 2,046 people in Norway collected as part of an ongoing survey of Norwegian public opinion. Survey participants were asked to what degree they experience anger, sadness, guilt, fear, and hope related to climate change.
Of the participants, 960 or about 48% reported feeling anger, the researchers report in the journal
Global Environmental Change. Anger was among the least common climate emotions; only guilt scored lower.
Those who reported feeling anger were also asked to write a sentence or two in response to the question: “What is it about climate change that makes you angry?” The researchers then read through the 832 responses to this question and sorted them into different categories.
Most of the responses reflected anger about the causes of climate change, rather than its consequences, the researchers found. Nearly 60% of responses mentioned anger about human actions (or lack thereof) contributing to climate change.
More than one-quarter mentioned being angry about human qualities. “We were a bit surprised about the number of people referring to ‘human qualities’ when asked about their reason to be angry,” says study team member Thea Gregersen, a climate change researcher at the Norwegian Research Centre in Bergen. It’s a stark finding that reflects “quite negative assessments of humankind—that people are uncaring, egoistic, selfish, and deny responsibility,” she says.
Politicians and greed—prioritizing money over the environment—were also common targets of people’s ire.
Still, about 10% of people who reported climate anger were angry not about climate change itself but rather about what they perceived as overblown attention to the issue and measures to stop climate change—what the researchers call ‘contrarian anger.’
“Our findings illustrate that the causes and consequences of climate emotions can be complex and that we need to avoid simplistic discussions of their motivating potential,” Gregersen says.
Japanoise: Music at the edge of circulation - David Novak
Want an academic Ethnographic study of the Japanese Noise scene and artists.
Here is the blurb from the back cover:
Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience.
For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called “Japanoise.” But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?
In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the “cultural feedback” that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.
The Neurogeometry of Perception: A Journey into Geometric Cognition
In the realm of cognitive science and neurology, there exists a fascinating intersection where geometry meets perception, aptly termed “neurogeometry”. This interdisciplinary field seeks to understand how our brains process and interpret the visual world through geometric structures and patterns. Alessandro Sarti and Giovanna Citti, prominent figures in this domain, have extensively explored the fundamental principles of neurogeometry, uncovering the intricate relationship between the architecture of our brains and the geometric forms we perceive.
“Neurogeometry” is not merely a fusion of “neuroscience” and “geometry”. It’s an ambitious endeavor to model the functional architecture of the primary visual cortex and understand how geometric patterns underpin our visual processing. As described by Sarti and Citti,
“We remind some basic principles of the neurogeometrical approach as it has been proposed by various researchers to model the functional architecture of the primary visual cortex.”
This statement underscores the comprehensive nature of the approach and its foundational importance in cognitive science. The very essence of neurogeometry lies in its quest to unravel the architectural blueprint of our perceptual processes. Our brains, complex and intricate, are not just passive receivers of visual stimuli. Instead, they actively construct a coherent understanding of the world through geometric frameworks. Every curve we perceive, every angle we discern, and every spatial relationship we recognize is a testament to the brain’s inherent ability to process the world geometrically. Neurogeometry, therefore, serves as a bridge, connecting the abstract realm of geometric shapes and patterns to the tangible reality of neural processes.
And Keanu says something really interesting to me on the first John Wick. He comes to me and he goes, “Look, just so you know, little bit of advice, when you edit, once a week, you should see the edit on the big screen.” And I’m like, OK, we’ll try. Later, alone with him, I’m going, “Well, why?” He’s like, “I’m a big-screen actor.” And I had no fucking idea what that meant. I thought it meant a movie star. And he’s like, “No, no, no, no.”
And he started talking to me about non-verbal acting, like gestures, motions. And he’s like, “Look, when you see me on a little monitor and I give this little look, it’s one thing. But when you see it on a 40-foot screen, that look’s going to say a lot. That’s what I want to play this guy as. So just please be aware of it, so when we punch in on the closeups, it’s going to mean something.” And it kind of really clicked for me right there.
I’ve always been fascinated by non-verbal gesture, body language. Keanu would go through and strip his dialogue down. It was like, “No, no, nope. I’m just going to cuddle the puppy.” In the first John Wick, he doesn’t talk for 32 minutes. Try to sell that one to a studio: You have Keanu Reeves and you’re not going to let him talk.
Its radius of action is small. Although it is larger than it seems. They do not like to move. Wander around. Do not go out of themselves. Avoid contacts. Let contacts come toward them. Let them slip away. Trying to smooth and polish their surface. Avoid shine at the same time. Shy away from attracting attention. Trivialize themselves (are harmless). But they do not hide. They are not seen. They are seen and not noticed. Leave them in peace. Forgets them not completely but has them not on the calculation.
Observe sit there watch (perhaps recognize) register collect try to keep do not commit (neither opinion nor information) put aside. Also appear. Not as what they are probably (or what they think they are). Rather as what they pretend to be. (What they pretend to be has a certain arbitrariness but is not indiscriminate. Variable within limits. These boundaries are shiftable but not resolvable).
Are not organized. They perceive organization as a contradiction. Are scattered. Not uniform but homogeneous. Cannot avoid being similar in the long run. Origin, language and position do not play a role. Rather already convictions. (But they think that these arise by themselves.) Are not anxious to come to each other. Although they meet. (Heissenbuttel)
One fallacy, I think, of anti piracy arguments is that a lot of them seem to assume that if I’m unable to pirate something I’m going to pay for it instead rather than going “oh! that’s a terrible shame” and then quickly forgetting about it
“If you were not pirating [media] you’d be paying for it and therefore piracy is evil 😡” actually if I were not pirating that media I would be thinking about something else. I have made the decision to not spend any money on this and even god himself could not shake it
the research on this was already done decades ago and then quickly squashed because the record labels did not like the finding that people who pirated music were spending way more money on actually buying music legally than people who did not pirate music. it turns out people who care enough to pirate media are generally big fans of that media and willing to spend money on it if they have the money to spend
article is from 2009 so we have known this for a LONG time.
The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded “free” music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.
Wisely, the study did not rely on music pirates’ honesty. Researchers asked music buyers to prove that they had proof of purchase.
I’m going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is… really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.
If you ask most English-speaking people (
or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it’s a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That’s certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since… idk elementary school when I learned that, I’ve learned that that’s actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of… dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?
Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!
Executive Function Theft (EFT) is the deliberate abdication of decision-making, tasks, and responsibilities that are perceived as administrative or repetitive, of lesser importance, or aren’t pleasant or shiny, to another person, with the result that the receiving person’s executive function becomes so exhausted that they are unable to participate in, contribute to, or enjoy higher level efforts.
Roman’s primary structure hangs from cables as it moves into the big clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
What Makes the Clean Room So Clean?
When you picture NASA’s most important creations, you probably think of a satellite, telescope, or maybe a rover. But what about the room they’re made in? Believe it or not, the room itself where these instruments are put together—a clean room—is pretty special.
One hundred miles west of Johannesburg in South Africa, the Komati Power Station is hard to miss, looming above the flat grassland and farming landscapes like an enormous eruption of concrete, brick, and metal.
When the coal-fired power station first spun up its turbines in 1961, it had twice the capacity of any existing power station in South Africa. It has been operational for more than half a century, but as of October 2022, Komati has been retired—the stacks are cold and the coal deliveries have stopped.
Now a different kind of activity is taking place on the site, transforming it into a beacon of clean energy: 150 MW of solar, 70 MW of wind, and 150 MW of storage batteries. The beating of coal-fired swords into sustainable plowshares has become the new narrative for the Mpumalanga province, home to most of South Africa’s coal-fired power stations, including Komati.
To get here, the South African government has had to think outside the box. Phasing out South Africa’s aging coal-fired power station fleet—which supplies 86 percent of the country’s electricity—is expensive and politically risky, and could come at enormous social and economic cost to a nation already struggling with energy security and socioeconomic inequality. In the past, bits and pieces of energy-transition funding have come in from organizations such as the World Bank, which assisted with the Komati repurposing, but for South Africa to truly leave coal behind, something financially bigger and better was needed.
That arrived at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021, in the form of a partnership between South Africa, European countries, and the US. Together, they made a deal to deliver $8.5 billion in loans and grants to help speed up South Africa’s transition to renewables, and to do so in a socially and economically just way.
This agreement was the first of what’s being called Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs, an attempt to catalyze global finance for emerging economies looking to shift energy reliance away from fossil fuels in a way that doesn’t leave certain people and communities behind.
Since South Africa’s pioneering deal, Indonesia has signed an agreement worth $20 billion, Vietnam one worth $15.5 billion, and Senegal one worth $2.75 billion. Discussions are taking place for a possible agreement for India. Altogether, around $100 billion is on the table.
There’s significant enthusiasm for JETPs in the climate finance arena, particularly given the stagnancy of global climate finance in general. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries signed up to a goal of mobilizing $100 billion of climate finance for developing countries per year by 2020. None have met that target, and the agreement lapses in 2025. The hope is that more funding for clear-cut strategies and commitments will lead to quicker moves toward renewables.
A “granfluencer” known as “our Filipino grandma” is among an army of US-based influencers being used by fossil fuel giants to promote major polluters to younger audiences, DeSmog can reveal.
TikTok star Nora Capistrano Sangalang – known as “Mama Nora” or “Lola” – is best known for posting videos of her family and her insistence that her young fans are well fed.
In September 2022, however, she stepped into a new realm – posting an advert promoting Shell’s fuel rewards programme to her over two million followers on TikTok and Instagram.
While the video racked up around 40,000 likes across both platforms, it also attracted dozens of negative comments from Sangalang’s fans, some of whom said they would be unfollowing her account.
“Love your account but why would you ever partner up with Shell, a company that has caused environmental disasters and is a major contributor to climate change?”, one follower said.
The post came months after Shell had advertised for a new staff member to manage its TikTok campaigns, and was part of a wider campaign to promote the 10 year anniversary of its fuel rewards programme.
DeSmog’s research found that Sangalang is among more than 100 influencers who have been used to promote oil and gas giants worldwide since 2017, from the US to Malaysia, reaching billions of people.
Shell’s use of Sangalang appears to be part of a concerted push from oil and gas supermajors to improve their image among younger generations.
Edelman, one of Shell’s principal PR agencies, said in relation to a 2017 campaign that the oil and gas giant set the task of “giving millennials a reason to connect emotionally with Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future”.
This mirrored a BP strategy document leaked in 2020, which showed how the firm sought to “reach influencers” in order to become “more relatable, passionate, and authentic” and “win the trust of the younger generation” – admitting that the company is “seen as one of the bad guys”.
In the US alone, DeSmog found 70 influencers, with a combined following of 17.5 million, who had promoted fossil fuel firms since 2017.
this is HUGELY good news because the cane toad is insanely invasive and will wipe out native species since almost nothing can kill it. ibis are considered pests and called ‘bin chickens’ etc, but they are native birds that are just sometimes annoying in urban spaces!
YES YES HUNT EAT KILL
LMAO, INTERESTING
this is possibly a game-changing adaptation. here in South Florida we have lots of ibises and lots of cane toads and those toads are SO dangerous to pets. one of many reasons you need to leash your dog and keep your cats inside, at least here. The poison toads are evil fuckers.
“According to OpenAI’s documentation, GPTBot will be identifiable by the user agent token "GPTBot,” with its full string being “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot)”.
The OpenAI docs also give instructions about how to block GPTBot from crawling websites using the industry-standard robots.txt file, which is a text file that sits at the root directory of a website and instructs web crawlers (such as those used by search engines) not to index the site.“
This Saturday (19 Aug), I’m appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I’m on a 2:30PM panel called “Return From Retirement,” followed by a signing:
Does
anyone like the American two party system? The parties are opaque, private organizations, weak institutions that are prone to capture and corruption, and gerrymandering’s “safe seats” means that the
real election often takes place in the party’s smoke-filled rooms, when a sure-thing candidate is selected:
But there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix it. For one thing, the two parties are in charge of any reform, and they’re in no hurry to put themselves out of business. It’s effectively impossible for a third party to gain any serious power in the USA, and that’s by design. After the leftist Populists party came within a spitting distance of power in the 1890s, the Dems and Repubs got together and cooked the system, banning fusion voting and erecting other structural barriers.
The Nader and Perot campaigns were doomed from the outset, in other words. Either candidate could have been far more popular than the D
and R on the ballot, and they still would have lost. It’s how the deck is stacked, and to unstack it, reformers would need to take charge of at least one – and probably both – of the parties.
But that’s not cause for surrender – it’s a call to action. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Thomas Frank (
Listen, Liberal) sets out another locus of power, one with the potential to deliver control over the party to its base: social movements:
As disasters like the wildfires that devastated the Hawaiian town of Lahaina and the storms that tore apart roofs from Alabama to Massachusetts last week intensify, insurance companies have pulled back from offering coverage in certain areas or cut the kinds of damage they will pay to repair.
A little-noticed slice of the financial industry that provides insurance to insurers, called reinsurance, has helped drive the changes.
These companies promise to step in with cash — usually huge amounts — when something like a hurricane, wildfire or other big disaster creates damage that is too costly and widespread for insurance companies to pay for on their own. And at the beginning of the year, nearly all of them raised prices.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 1, when about half of reinsurance policies are renewed for the year, reinsurers broke the news to insurance companies across the United States and Canada — from large national carriers like State Farm and Farmers to smaller, more specialized firms — that their prices were going up. That led to a flurry of tense negotiations between those insurers and firms, like Swiss Re, Odyssey Re and other reinsurers, many of whom are headquartered outside of the United States.
Reinsurers’ increased prices have accelerated changes in an industry grappling with a new sense of uncertainty. The world is warming; storms are getting more intense; inflation has increased the cost of rebuilding after a disaster; and a global increase in interest rates is making money itself more expensive.
Since the beginning of the year, insurance companies have paid out $40 billion to U.S. customers, putting them on track for another record in yearly losses. At every level, the costs of guarding against risk are rising and everyone, from the leaders of large companies to the owners of homes and small businesses, is feeling the squeeze.
Excerpt from this Op-Ed by David Wallace-Wells, published in the
New York Times:
It wasn’t even really a wildfire. By the time the flames passed through Lahaina, Hawaii — burning a beloved 150-year-old banyan tree and throwing embers so far that when residents jumped into the ocean for relief, they saw the hulls of boats floating among them on fire, too — it had long since left the wild land behind. Instead it had become another instance of what the climate scientist Daniel Swain memorably called the return of the “urban firestorm.”
The string of examples is growing: the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2017; the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., the following year; and the Marshall fire in Boulder County, Colo., in 2021, which after burning through a lot of nearby vegetation made a jump to a shopping center with a Costco and a Chuck E. Cheese and ultimately destroyed more than 1,000 homes. You might think of these events as having two ignitions: the first when the natural landscape begins to burn, from a lightning strike or a dropped match or a downed power line, and the second when that fire, often supercharged by climate conditions, makes the jump to buildings and cars and other forms of modern infrastructure and keeps burning.
In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. But increasingly, fires emerging hotter and more intense from the natural landscape are burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel, jumping from home to home as earlier fires would jump from tree crown to tree crown, with vegetation, Swain told me when I interviewed him in the wake of the Marshall fire for New York magazine, acting only as a wick. These firestorms may seem like a harbinger, he said, but they are also a throwback, to a time a century or more ago when towns and cities, in a time of wood-frame buildings and premodern firefighting, regularly stared down the threat of incineration by flame.
Concern trolling is basically when you pretend to care about an issue in order to undermine and derail any measures that would be taken to address the actual, underlying problem that’s affecting society. Instead, it’s a tactic that’s used to:
trigger infighting among the groups/people who are actively working on the true problem,
reframe the argument to try and take power away from an actual, effective movement,
and to flood the public discussion with noise and distraction, often with tremendous success.
This is a particularly fruitful tactic when the seeds of fear are already present, as it’s extremely easy to take an already fearful (sometimes, justifiably so) group and point them toward an imagined boogeyman, causing them to attack and fixate on a completely extraneous, possibly even non-existent, problem instead.
Termite mounds are a common phenomenon of the Top End landscape. Each termite mound is equivalent to a skyscraper in a human city. They have different styles and colours due to different termite species and different building materials. They are the oldest cities! Kakadu & Litchfield NP.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked, A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Cognitive Warfare includes activities conducted in synchronization with other Instruments of Power, to affect attitudes and behaviours, by influencing, protecting, or disrupting individual, group, or population level cognition, to gain an advantage over an adversary. Designed to modify perceptions of reality, whole-of-society manipulation has become a new norm, with human cognition shaping to be a critical realm of warfare.
Cognitive Warfare focuses on attacking and degrading rationality, which can lead to exploitation of vulnerabilities and systemic weakening. However, this becomes increasingly complex as non-military targets are involved. An example: Russian social media and public information operations targeted much of the international community in an attempt to label Ukraine as being at fault. Through a combination of communication technologies, fake news stories, and perceptions manipulation, Russia aims to influence public opinion, as well as decay public trust towards open information sources. These narratives have extensive reach, and often involve both offensive and defensive posturing.
mammatocumulus, meaning “mammary cloud”) is a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud, typically a cumulonimbus raincloud, although they may be attached to other classes of parent clouds. The name mammatus is derived from the Latin mamma (meaning “udder” or “breast”).
A topic I do not see explained often enough in Solarpunk groups is:
What actually is Ecofascism? Basically every Solarpunk group I have ever been to has the rules “No Greenwashing” and “No Ecofascism”, but while Greenwashing will be explained quite well, eco fascism often isn’t. So please let me explain it to you.
Naomi Klein called it “environmentalism through genocide”, which is a very apt description.
In general Ecofascism links the land and its nature to the lands people - or rather the perceived people. Because, of course, for the most part it is a white supremacist ideology (though variations of it have sprung up in non-white countries like Japan), so first and foremost they link colonial land to the white settlers, not the indigenous people.
As such Ecofascism very much started out with someone being appalled by indigenous people taking care of their land, as according to this white dude this did not leave the land in its prestine condition. This dude was a bloke called Madison Grant. He wrote a book about the “Great Race”. A book that Hitler later went on to call “his bible”. And obviously he was like all for eugenicism and what not.
Now, I could go on and on about the history of it, but really, it is not important.
First and foremost the central believe of ecofascism goes something like this:
There are too many people living on earth right now which is the reason for environmental destruction and climate change. Hence some people need to die to save the planet.
Only certain people (most of the time they mean white people) are abled to properly take care of the environment, while everyone else is destroying it.
To put it very popculturally: Thanos is basically an ecofascist. Which is why the entire “Thanos was right” narrative is so fucking dangerous and why the Russos did horrible by making him sympathetic.
Now, of course Thanos is in so far still just a bit tamer than your average ecofascist, because he is like “equally out of every group people need to die”. Meanwhile your typical ecofascists will usually very clearly say: “People from any group that is not my group need to die.”
As I said: Most ecofascism is linked to white supremacism. They will usually use arguments about overpopulation and then point to China, India and Africa.
What they of course will ignore in all those arguments is, that a) historically no country has as much emissions as Europe and the US and b) that the richtest 10% of humanity emits more CO2 and other environmental pollutants than the poorest 50% combined. So, as long as the “killing too many people” does not involve those top 10%, it is not gonna make much of a ditch when it comes to the environment.
Additionally to those genocidal ideations, it basically also has the unscientific idea, that the only way to take care of nature is to leave it alone and in a “prestine” condition. Which often leads to more natural desasters and completely forgets that humans are, indeed, a part of nature.
So, yeah… It is basically just is white supremacy paired with capitalism and eugenics.
It is shitty as fuck. So, please, call it out if you see it.
The automata described in the
Iliad are not the only self-moving entities in ancient literature imagined as possessing some for of intelligence and agency. In the
Argonautic, for example, a supernatural oak beam in Jason’s ship, the
Argo, can speak and prophesy. Even more compelling in terms of an ancient vision of “Artificial Intelligence,” however, are the remarkable ships of the Phaeacians, inhabitants of the technologically marvelous land encountered by Odysseus, in Homer’s
Odyssey (7-8). Phaecian ships require no rudders or oars, no human pilots, navigators, or rowers, but are steered by thought alone. The Homeric myth envisions the vessels as controlled by some sort of centralized system, with access to a vast data archive of “virtual” maps and navigation charts of the entire ancient world.
Adrienne Mayor. 2018. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I thought, where I am already here, trying to get everyone to engage with Solarpunk as more than just an aesthetic and pretty flowers, I should give a quick overview over the Solarpunk antholigies, that have been released so far.
Note that so far most releases within the genre are in fact short stories. Though if anyone is interested, I can make a list of the novels I am aware of!
Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable Worldis pretty much how the genre got its start. The book was originally released in Brazil and only recently had been translated into the English language. It only covers a few stories, but those are a bit longer than your average short story to make up for it.
Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation has been quoted by many writers in the genre to have been a massive inspiration to them. The stories are very diverse and cover lots of ground.
Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology is probably the weirdest out of this bunch. While all of the other anthologies mostly focus on either SciFi settings or stories set in the here and now, Wings of Renewal mixes Solarpunk with Fantasy elements. At times those stories are SciFi, too, at times they are really mostly fantastical.
Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summersexplores a wide variety of Solarpunk settings, some hopeful, some less optimistic. It is mostly set in warm and hot scenarios, though those can also vary quite a bit.
Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters then went ahead as a “sequel” of sorts to explore the concept of Solarpunk in colder climates.
Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures has probably to be my favorite one from the anthologies edited by Serena Udaberri. It explores how humans and animals can live together in Urban settings. And once again, the stories vary from those set in a more futuristic and a more present setting a lot.
Fighting for the Future is the most recent of those anthologies, as it has only released last month. (And yes, this also means: I have not yet read it at all.) It features stories of Cyberpunk and Solarpunk futures - as well as stories where both intertwine!
Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology is exactly what it says on the cover. An anthology featuring Lunarpunk stories. So Solarpunk with a bit more mysticism to go with it. And as this also only has released earlier this year I admittedly also have not gotten around to reading it yet.
This does remind me though: Would anyone be interested in me writing mini reviews to the stories in those anthologies?
It’s not that conservatives aren’t sometimes right — it’s that even when they’re right, they’re
highly selective about it. Take the hoary chestnut that “incentives matter,” trotted out to deny humane benefits to poor people on the grounds that “free money” makes people “workshy.”
There’s a whole body of conservative economic orthodoxy, Public Choice Theory, that concerns itself with the motives of callow, easily corrupted regulators, legislators and civil servants, and how they might be tempted to distort markets.
But the same people who obsess over our fallible public institutions are convinced that private institutions will never yield to temptation, because the fear of competition keeps temptation at bay. It’s this belief that leads the right to embrace monopolies as “efficient”: “A company’s dominance is evidence of its quality. Customers flock to it, and competitors fail to lure them away, therefore monopolies are the public’s best friend.”
But this only makes sense if you don’t understand how monopolies can prevent competitors. Think of Uber, lighting $31b of its investors’ cash on fire, losing 41 cents on every dollar it brought in, in a bid to drive out competitors and make public transit seem like a bad investment.
Or think of Big Tech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:
Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave — because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in — the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:
Okay, I guess this has to be said, because the people will always claim the same wrong thing: No, Solarpunk did not “start out as an aesthetic”.
Jesus, where the hell does this claim even come from? Like, honestly, I am asking.
Solarpunk started out as a genre, that yes, did also include design elements, but also literary elements. A vaguely defined literary genre, but a genre never the less.
And I am not even talking about those early books that we today also claim under the Solarpunk umbrella. So, no, I am not talking about Ursula K. LeGuin, even though she definitely was a big influence on the genre.
The actual history of Solarpunk goes something like that: In the late 1990s and early 2000s the term “Ecopunk” was coined, which was used to refer to books that kinda fit into the Cyberpunk genre umbrella, but were more focused on ecological themes. This was less focused on the “high tech, high life” mantra that Solarpunk ended up with, but it was SciFi stories, that were focused on people interacting with the environment. Often set to a backdrop of environmental apocalypse. Now, other than Solarpunk just a bit later, this genre never got that well defined (especially with Solarpunk kinda taking over the role). As such there is only a handful of things that ever officially called themselves Ecopunk.
At the same time, though, the same sort of thought was picked up in the Brazilian science fiction scene, where the idea was further developed. Both artistically, where it got a lot of influence from the Amazofuturism movement, but also as an ideology. In this there were the ideas from Ecopunk as the “scifi in the ecological collaps” in there, but also the idea of “scifi with technology that allows us to live within the changing world/allows us to live more in harmony with nature”.
Now, we do not really know who came up with the idea of naming this “Solarpunk”. From all I can find the earliest mention of the term “Solarpunk” that is still online today is in this article from the Blog Republic of Bees. But given the way the blogger talks about it, it is clear there was some vague definition of the genre before it.
These days it is kinda argued about whether that title originally arose in Brazil or in the Anglosphere. But it seems very likely that the term was coined between 2006 and 2008, coming either out of the Brazilian movement around Ecopunk or out of the English Steampunk movement (specifically the literary branch of the Steampunk genre).
In the following years it was thrown around for a bit (there is an archived Wired article from 2009, that mentions the term once, as well as one other article), but for the moment there was not a lot happening in this regard.
Until 2012, when the Brazilian Solarpunk movement really started to bloom and at the same time in Italy Commando Jugendstil made their appearance. In 2012 in Brazil the anthology “Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável” was released (that did get an English translation not too long ago) establishing some groundwork for the genre. And Commando Jugendstil, who describe themselves as both a “Communication Project” and an “Art Movement”, started to work on Solarpunk in Italy. Now, Commando Jugendstil is a bit more complicated than just one or the other. As they very much were a big influence on some of the aesthetic concepts, but also were releasing short stories and did some actual punky political action within Italy.
And all of that was happening in 2012, where the term really started to take off.
And only after this, in 2014, Solarpunk became this aesthetic we know today, when a (now defuct) tumblr blog started posting photos, artworks and other aesthetical things under the caption of Solarpunk. Especially as it was the first time the term was widely used within the Anglosphere.
Undoubtedly: This was probably how most people first learned of Solarpunk… But it was not how Solarpunk started. So, please stop spreading that myth.
The reason this bothers me so much is, that it so widely ignores how this movement definitely has its roots within Latin America and specifically Brazil. Instead this myth basically tries to claim Solarpunk as a thing that fully and completely originated within the anglosphere. Which is just is not.
And yes, there was artistic aspects to that early Solarpunk movement, too. But also a literary and political aspectt. That is not something that was put onto a term that was originally an aesthetic - but rather it was something that was there from the very beginning.
Again: There has been an artistic and aesthetic aspect in Solarpunk from the very beginning, yes. But there has been a literary and political aspect in it the entire time, too. And trying to divorce Solarpunk from those things is just wrong and also… kinda misses the point.
So, please. Just stop claiming that entire “it has been an aesthetic first” thing. Solarpunk is a genre of fiction, it is a political movement, just as much as it is an artistic movement. Always has been. And there has always been punk in it. So, please, stop acting as if Solarpunk is just “pretty artistic vibes”. It is not.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, I guess.
Hi! Admin Jay here! Great overview thanks @alpaca-clouds! Commando Jugendstil are good friends of ours, we love them a lot, solidarity!
Perhaps one day the folks behind this blog will write the history of Solarpunk - as we understand it - because its way weirder than you’d expect! lol
For now tho, for those interested, you can find a (more or less complete) history of Solarpunk media online from 2008-18 at the reference guide we put together.
The first Solarpunk post on Tumblrever was our ‘The initial equation’ posted by Admin Adam Flynn, June 2012.
Concurring with Alpaca,
Solarpunk hasalwaysbeen about more than pretty aesthetics: Check out Adam’s July 2012 essay ’On the Need for New Futures’ republished here with a forward which was written after the IRL/Online Solarpunk meet-up at WeirdShitConPortland 2012. Post which, many of the other early admins on this blog got added and involved.
It’s worth mentioning that
'Need for New Futures’ends with a bunch of open political and social questions asking what Solarpunk could become? (as it wasn’t anything at all at the time) the last two being:
What is the visual aesthetic of Solarpunk?
Who’s with us?
Solarpunk as it’s known today originates in Brazil!
When ’
Need for New Futures’ went online ’
Histórias ecológicas’ was yet to be published, but novelist
JesseaPerry was aware of it, and said the word 'Solarpunk’ to Adam - and the rest is history.
Subsequently,
Solarpunk had parallel development in the Anglosphere and in Brazil with NO contact between the two scenes until after the publication of the Kickstarted translation of
Histórias ecológicas in English by Sarena Ulibarri at Worldweavers in 2017. We (folks behind this blog) have had our lives
enriched immensely by contact and dialogue with Solarpunks in Brazil since this happened! The
Solarpunk movement at large is in great debt to Sarena!
Being involved in Solarpunk and its community of - kind, motivated people, who are concerned with the struggles en route to a better world, the solutions to live comfortably without fossil fuels, how to equitably manage scarcity and share abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share - for the last decade, has been one of the biggest and most meaningful experiences of my life.
Thank you Solarpunks 🙏.
I’ll close with our groupblogs tagline since the beginning:
Solarpunk: At once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, and an achievable lifestyle. In progress…
The counterculture saw computers as tools in service to corporate and government power. Providing everyday people with access to the machines was a radical act.
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Known as “St. Jude,” Jude Milhon was born in 1939 and became a self-taught programmer and advocate for civil rights and women in computing. In 1973, she and other hackers created Community Memory in Berkeley, California, a computerized bulletin board that was one of the first public computer network systems. Anyone could post messages on the terminal, which was connected to a mainframe timeshared computer the collective owned in San Francisco.
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The Community Memory service offered bulletin boards, messages, classified ads, and more. Some were online extensions of the physical bulletin boards that were an institution in the record store in Berkeley where the terminal was located. Musicians quickly adapted to the machine to post information about concerts, to sell instruments, and connect.
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Jude was committed to using her technical and writing skills to encourage women to join the world of computing. “Girls need modems!”
The passages about the tripods and the automatically opening gates of Olympus (
Iliad5.749 and 18.376) are the earliest appearances of the ancient Greek word αὐτόμᾰτον,
automaton, “acting of one’s own will.” In the fourth-Century BC, Aristotle quoted the Homeric verse and referref to the tripod-carts as
automata (
Politics 1.1253b). Notably, Philostratus (AD 170-245) reported that the peripatetic sage Apollonius of Tyana saw many amazing sights in India in the first or second century AD (
Life of Apollonius 6.11). Among the
thaumata, “wonders,” were
tripodes de automatoi and automatic cupbearers that attended royal banquets.
Adrienne Mayor. 2018. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
by Takeyoshi Tanuma / 田沼武能
Girls carrying a portable shrine for the sanja Festival, Asakusa, 1963 / 三社祭りの女子神輿も珍しくなくなる、浅草、1963
From the book: Picturing My Tokyo 1948-1964 / 東京わが残像
“Morbius, Goncharov, and Barbenheimer, as I see it, all play on the same comedic tension that you see with the baby-girlification of (usually male) characters from shows like Breaking Bad or Succession. The joke is about deflating The Serious Man archetype and, also, about deflating — or at least challenging — how prestige is defined by Hollywood. That’s the joke. A movie about a doll is being released on the same day as a big biopic about the man who developed the nuclear bomb and it’s directed by the film-broiest-film-bro director of the current era. Isn’t that funny? Oh, they’re both actually equally good movies? That’s even funnier. But brands still don’t understand that memes are large-scale inside jokes and are, more often than not, making fun of them. Hell, I’m willing go even further and say that all memes exist, at a base level, in direct opposition to marketing and, yet, brands still think they can safely co-opt this stuff and convert it into money. When in reality it’s much more like trying to safely ride a bucking bronco. I don’t think the Japanese reaction to Barbenheimer, which I should add is pretty reasonable, ultrantionalists aside, will break through to the average internet user and “kill the meme” or whatever — partly because nothing can “break through” anymore because America no longer has a coherent mass media apparatus. But I do think Barbenheimer is a great example of how little control these aging industries still have. Warner Bros. was given the easiest layup of a random viral lightning-in-a-bottle moment you could ask for and still managed to turn it into an international incident.”
A growing number of subcultures, digital communities and guilds have turned their back on ad-supported social media and migrated their social and cultural activities to semi-private digital spaces, chat rooms and Discord servers. We believe these spaces have the potential to become decentralised institutions that are financed, owned and governed by their own members. To support this vision we propose Moving Castles, an organisational metaphor and real-time media type which combines collective agency and public participation in modular and portable multiplayer miniverses.
In order to be a viable alternative to clearnet stadiums, Moving Castles must reflect the following principles. The principles are adapted from the design goals described in Modular Politics.
Collective: Many contributors share control through transparent and real-time governance mechanisms.
Portable: To avoid lock-in mechanisms, Moving Castles have the ability to move freely between platforms, standards and protocols, from private to public, without losing any value, knowledge, or lore in the process.
Modular: Communities should have the ability to construct Moving Castles by creating, importing, and arranging composable parts (such as avatars, props and environments) together as a coherent whole while making these parts available for others to reuse and adapt.
Interoperable: They have the ability to interact with other communities; communicating, playing games, and sharing knowledge & skills in order to help these communities become Moving Castles themselves.
My next book is
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require
mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to
any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
Let’s start with how hard it is to not use Google. Google spends
fifty billion dollars per year on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Samsung, Firefox and elsewhere. Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.
Small wonder there are so few search alternatives — and small wonder that the most promising ones are suffocated for lack of market oxygen.
Google Search is as big as it could possibly be. The sub-ten-percent of the search market that Google doesn’t own isn’t ever going to voluntarily come into the Google fold. Those brave iconoclasts are intimately familiar with Google Search and have had to override one or more defaults in order to get shut of it. They aren’t customers-in-waiting who just need a little more persuading.
That means that Google Search can’t grow by adding new customers. It can only grow by squeezing its existing customers harder.
For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself.
/The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse./
In 2020, Robert Kuciemba, a woodworker in San Francisco was infected with covid by a co-worker after his Nevada-based Victory Woodworks transferred a number of sick workers to the San Francisco site for a few months.
Through the proceedings of the case it turns out that the employer knew some employees might be sick but they transferred them anyway and ignored a San Francisco ordinance in place at the time to quarantine suspected covid cases.
Kuciemba was subsequently infected and he then infected his wife, who ended up in ICU on a ventilator.
The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court’s words, “morally” the right thing to do, would create “dire financial consequences for employers” and cause a “dramatic expansion of liability” to stop the spread of covid.
There’s a few stunning details to note in this case. First, the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.”
Secondly, the case was so obviously important to the struggle between capitalism and mass infection that the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organisation got involved and helped the company with its defence. Remember, this is a tiny company in a niche industry. The involvement of the biggest business lobbyists in the country tells us a lot about the importance of the principle they knew was at stake.
Thirdly, the defence of the company is very telling. They said “There is simply no limit to how wide the net will be cast: the wife who claims her husband caught COVID-19 from the supermarket checker, the husband who claims his wife caught it while visiting an elder care home.“
Well, exactly. Capitalism couldn’t survive if employers were liable for covid infections contracted in the workplace, and the ripple effect of those infections. And they know it.
This case is something of a covid smoking gun, revealing what we always suspected but had never seen confirmed in so many words: the public health imperative of controlling a pandemic virus by making employers liable for some of that control is, and always must be, secondary to capitalist profit.
This ruling is also saying out loud what has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last two years: employers don’t have a responsibility to keep your family safe from covid. You have that responsibility. And if you give a family member covid that you caught at work and they get sick or die –
even if it was a result of law-breaking by your employer – that’s on you buddy.
It is the same old capitalist story: the shunting of responsibility for ills that should be shared across society, including employers in that society, onto individuals.
This ruling essentially helps codify workplace mass infection and justifies it as necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalism.
This is not new. This is where the ‘just a cold’ and the ‘mild’ narrative came from. It came from doctors and healthcare experts whose first loyalty was to capitalism. Not to public health. To money, not to lives. Abetted by media who uncritically platformed them.
While this ruling tells us little that we couldn’t already see from the public policy approach of the last two years, it is revealing (and to some extent validating) to see it confirmed by the highest law of the land in the United States.
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